Newsweek Cares about (some of) your Tweets. Fox News Not so Much.

by Adam Sherk on May 1, 2009

I’ve been surprised by how many people choose to follow the main Twitter account of major news sites. I know in some cases it’s because they are featured as “suggested users” to people who sign up for a new Twitter account. But it seems like there are much better ways to monitor daily news feeds.

Just out of curiosity I thought I’d check how many users some of these news sites are following back from their main accounts.

I pulled these charts from Twitter Grader (which incidentally gave all of these accounts a grade of 99 or higher). The figures are from today.

You can see that Newsweek wins the prize for following the most people, and Fox News hasn’t followed a single person:

Newsweek Twitter stats 5/1/09
Washingtonpost Twitter stats 5/1/09
Usnews Twitter stats 5/1/09
Nytimes Twitter stats 5/1/09
Time Twitter stats 5/1/09
Economist Twitter stats 5/1/09
CNN Twitter Stats 5/1/09
Foxnews Twitter stats 5/1/09

Of course none of this really matters, since for the most part these Twitter accounts are just for pumping out article links. Actual reader interaction happens through the personal accounts of members of their marketing and editorial staffs, and a number of media outlets are starting to get the hang of it.

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