I have done several posts on news organizations and Facebook recently so I thought it was time to switch things up and look at Twitter again. There is of course much more to the social media universe than just The Bobbsey Twins. But Twitter, Facebook in some cases Digg still represent the majority of social media referrals to many news sites, so they continue to be a priority.

Since I have ranked news sites in various areas in the past (Facebook Pages, page speed and domain authority) I thought I’d do something similar for their Twitter profiles. The easiest thing to compare is reach based on Twitter followers and I’ve included that data below. But which news sites are making the most of their Twitter presence?

To help answer that question I used Twitalyzer to evaluate the main Twitter profile of 30+ major news organizations including a mix of newspapers, magazines, TV and online-only outlets. There are many different Twitter analysis tools out there but I’ve seen Twitalyzer mentioned several times recently so I decided to try it out.

The data point they make available without a subscription is called “Impact.” Impact is calculated by combining the following factors:

• The number of followers a user has
• The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people
• The relative frequency at which the user posts updates

A paid Twitalyzer account also provides Influence and Engagement scores which would be interesting to look at another time.

Please accept the usual caveats about the accuracy of the data, methodology of the tool, etc. What I am most interested in is making a relative comparison between the various news sites. With that in mind, here are the main Twitter profiles for 30+ news organizations ranked by Impact score:

@nytimes takes #1 by a small margin, but the top nine Twitter profiles are all closely bunched together with Impact scores between 75.8% and 78.5%. Starting with #10 things begin to drop off. At the bottom of the table poor @BW, @csmonitoronline and @aolnews each got scores below 10%.

I thought @ColonelTribune would have scored much higher than 23% since they have a decent number of followers and it is a dynamic, popular Twitter profile. It is also interesting that despite that low score the profile is still in the 99.4th percentile:

Perhaps @ColonelTribune is more popular among industry professionals (as an example of a great Twitter persona) than typical users and news consumers. Or maybe Twitalyzer missed the boat on that one. What do you think?

UPDATE:
Jeff Katz, Twitalyzer’s Product Lead, gave me some more information on how Impact scores are calculated and how this would factor into @ColonelTribune’s 23%:

“As you pointed in your post, the Impact score is calculated (and weighted) based on a few variables. While I would have to dig in a bit further, I did notice that @ColonelTribune does many things well on Twitter, but he (or she) does not retweet others, which is one of the factors of the Impact score. In fact, @ColonelTribune only RT’d someone else just once in the past 90 days. That said, @ColonelTribune is in the 99.4th % in terms of Impact and given that it is the only regional account (kind of hard to argue that NY Times is not a bigger national and international account) in the top 25 speaks volume.”

So specific to Impact, it is important not only to retweet but to retweet others as well. This also shows that despite its lack of retweeting and the fact that the Chicago Tribune is somewhat regional in nature (they do also compete for national news online) @ColonelTribune has done well to reach the 99.4th percentile.

Jeff also pointed out that because the free version of Twitalyzer is an on-demand service they only processes scores when someone manually requests a particular profile to be updated. This has an impact on the way the various metrics are calculated. The scores are based on 30 day averages, so profiles that are updated more often are working with a larger data set than profiles that may have been updated only once. So the number of times that @ColonelTribune has been updated in the last 30 days will also factor into its Impact score and other metrics.

Related posts:

1. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
2. Twitter Suggested Users – Today’s Studio 54 Velvet Rope
3. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter

A new baseball season is underway and we are in that wonderfully brief period when fans all over the country still believe this could actually be the year for their team. Enjoy it while you can.

But while major market teams have a big advantage in the real game, social media is the great equalizer online, so I thought I’d see which teams have attracted the largest following on Twitter and Facebook. After getting good response to the posts I did on NFL and NBA teams I wanted to add MLB to the mix.

So without further ado here are the 30 Major League Baseball teams, ranked by total number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans:

I’ll add the usual caveats: these numbers change very quickly but I find taking a snapshot at various points useful for comparison (perhaps I’ll update this at the All Star break and the end of the season). And of course social media is not a popularity contest; it’s how you engage your followers/fans that really matters. But reach has value too and I like to see which teams are faring best in that area.

Baseball is a game of statistics after all, so looking at numbers seems fitting. I could take it further and come up with analogies for batting average and on-base percentage like average tweets per day or retweet percentages, but maybe another time.

Not surprisingly the Yankees and Red Sox are at the top of the standings, although Boston is far behind the Yankees and Phillies in Twitter followers. I believe that playing in the World Series got the Yankees and Phillies added to the previous version of Twitter’s Suggested Users list, which is likely why their numbers are so much higher.

In looking at the figures above, it is clear that teams are attracting much larger audiences through Facebook than Twitter at this point.

On a different note, if I was the Detroit Tigers I’d get in touch with Facebook. While the Tigers fan page has 248k+ fans, as of today the only page Facebook search shows for “Detroit Tigers” is an unofficial, outdated page with 841 fans:

Even clicking “See More Results” doesn’t surface the real page – I had to use Google to find it.

As Markus points out in the comments below, the problem with Facebook search and the Detroit Tigers page was actually that I used the misspelling “Detriot” in my search query. Pretty embarrassing. I guess I can salvage things by using this to point out that Facebook search needs to do a better job of understanding the user intent behind common misspellings!

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

It has been a couple months since Google Social Search was made available in beta to all users on Google.com, so I thought I would revisit it from a marketing perspective.

As I covered when Social Search initially launched in Google Labs, for companies the main objective in social search optimization is to get included in their target audiences’ social circles. That’s great for marketers, but is it what Google wants?

On The Current State of Social Search panel at SMX West a few weeks ago, I asked Johanna Wright, Google’s Director of Product Management, Web Search, about this. Johanna said she could understand why brands would want to connect with users through Social Search, but that Google had developed it with individuals in mind, not companies.

Thus there isn’t any type of official Google profile for companies as there is with Facebook Pages or branded YouTube channels. It is still possible for a company to set up a Google profile; Tad Miller offered tips on this last year. But the lack of an official corporate option complicates the process for businesses, particularly if someone else has already created a Gmail account with their brand. Danny Sullivan wrote about this in connection with Google Buzz last month.

Despite these challenges companies are experimenting with Social Search and the launch of Google Buzz has increased the number of brands setting up Google profiles, particularly news and content sites. But ultimately what companies need is for users to connect with them through various social media outlets and then link to those accounts from their own Google profiles.

So how well does this translate into brand visibility in Google Social Search?

To get a sense of how it’s working, I took a look at my own social circle and Social Search results. I follow a number of different news sites (and other companies) on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and each of those accounts is linked on my Google Profile. I’m also subscribed to 368 feeds in Google Reader including a wide range of blogs and news sites. So in theory I should have as good a chance as anyone of having brands and especially news sites in my social circle.

In the current “snapshot” of my social circle there are 432 direct connections and 28 secondary connections. Of those 460 connections, 67 are companies, news sites or blogs, roughly 15%. (This information is available by clicking the “My social circle” link above your social results or going directly to this page while signed into your Google account).

So while Google created Social Search with individuals in mind, at least in my own experience brands are not specifically being excluded although they are certainly a minority.

I was also curious how Google Social Search was connecting me to the 67 non-individuals. Here’s the breakdown:

• Twitter 42
• FriendFeed 19
• Digg 4
• Flickr 2

At least in my case, following a brand on Twitter offers the best chance of having them added to my social circle. Content included in my social results through Google Reader subscriptions is not covered in Google’s social circle snapshot so I can’t tie any numbers to that.

Of the 67 brands in my social circle, only five are major news sites or magazines: The Huffington Post, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Business Insider and Hürriyet (a national newspaper in Turkey). I’m not sure why these five made the cut. At least to-date the only one that frequently pops up in my social results is Sports Illustrated, but it is nearly always just a link to their SI_24Seven Twitter profile, or one of its Twitter Lists, as seen in these results for “nba”:

(By the way…go Bulls!)

In a couple months of checking I’ve never had a SI.com article appear in my social results. I can get the other four news sites to surface for branded searches, but I’ve yet to see them come up for any non-branded queries. That seems odd since all five produce content every single day and I’m often shown outdated or not fully relevant listings from other members of my social circle. But I think this is more related to Social Search still being an early beta product than content from brands being intentionally de-emphasized.

The bottom line: Google Social Search does offer opportunities for brands, but it is still early days and the results are mixed at best. In addition, having a news site in your social circle via Twitter does not necessarily mean that actual editorial content from the site will be included in your social results. But as the overall quality of Social Search improves I expect this to get better. And hopefully Google will decide to offer Google profiles for companies in the future.

How often are you seeing content from brands in your Social Search results?

Related posts:

1. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
2. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

The major search engines are making real-time search a priority, resulting in good visibility opportunities for news sites especially for breaking news. Google, Bing and Yahoo are all experimenting with various forms of real-time results now and making deals with Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. So how can news sites maximize their real-time search visibility?

It should be noted that there many forms of real-time search, including Twitter Search itself and sites like OneRiot, Collecta and Topsy, among others. But in this post I am focusing on real-time results in the major search engines.

First, a quick look at how news content is currently being included in real-time search results.

In its “Latest results” Google blends results from Google News and Google Blog Search with updates from Twitter and Facebook Pages, offering multiple paths in for news and content sites.

For example as news was breaking on the Chile earthquake a couple weeks ago, The New York Times created a Twitter List to pull together the latest information from a variety of sources. The Chile Earthquake list was shared quite a bit on Twitter, causing it to appear frequently in real-time search results.

As this was happening, the real-time results for “earthquake in Chile” (at the time of this screen grab) included both the actual breaking news article and a retweet of @nytimes announcing the List, creating a double impression:

Editorial content is even more prominent on Bing Twitter, where the “Top links shared in Tweets” get a dedicated place on the page and remain there for longer periods of time. To-date the top links for many queries tend to be news sites as seen in this example for “NCAA tournament”:

In this particular case The New York Times was not included in the top links section but it did appear in the regular tweet stream. The fact that Bing identifies the source of any shortened URL helps credible news sources to stand out, particularly in the top links section where the domain for each link is referenced four times.

The opportunity is more limited on Yahoo, with real-time results limited to two tweets featured in the Twitter tab of the “Latest News” box:

However links to news content are often included in the highlighted tweets and Yahoo plans to incorporate more real-time content soon.

Real-time Search Optimization

As can be seen, news sites have some real advantages in competing for real-time search visibility particularly in Google and Bing. News organizations can quickly gain multiple listings and sustain them for a period of time through user retweets. This combined with the fact that well-known, trusted sources stand out from the clutter increases the likelihood of getting clicks.

So what can news sites do to maximize their visibility in real-time search?

• Monitor hot topics and trends to understand what users are searching for and talking about




• Add keyword support to tweets and updates and utilize hashtags




• Coordinate content promotion activities, timing tweets and Facebook Page updates for shortly after articles and blog posts are indexed in Google News or Google Blog Search




• Mobilize fans and followers through active engagement to foster an influx of tweets, shares and links to content, particularly from authoritative users. This helps to keep the content in the real-time stream and to establish it as a top shared link




• Act quickly – real-time search opportunities don’t stick around for long

These steps are pretty straightforward but the nature of real-time search also creates challenges. Here are some additional things to keep in mind:

• True real-time results happen in the moment and are fleeting, so it is difficult to sustain visibility. I had difficulty keeping up just to grab screenshots for this post (fortunately both Google and Bing have a “pause” button)




• The engines are still in a testing and experimentation phase, so real-time is not being strongly promoted yet and many users are not even aware it exists




• A recent eye tracking study from Oneupweb showed that user engagement with real-time search results is still limited, although it fared better with users looking for news content




• In terms of tracking there is not currently a simple way to separate real-time referrals from other Google, Bing or Yahoo search referrals. Tom Critchlow of Distilled offered some potential workarounds in a recent SEOMoz post, but it’s not an easy process right now. Tracking data from URL shorteners like Bit.ly can help to paint a clearer picture

If you have any additional tips or observations, I’d love to learn them. What are you doing to increase the real-time search visibility of your content?

UPDATE:
Some new developments: Google is now including “Top Links” with its real-time results and is allowing users to zoom in and “replay” tweets from specific dates and times. And Bing is experimenting with blending Twitter results into its main Web results.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. Google News Optimization Tips
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

For my presentation on Twitter Marketing Tactics at SMX West this week I wanted to get a sense of just how much traffic Twitter is driving to major news sites. So I conducted an informal poll of 10 US newspaper and magazine sites that Define works with or I am friendly with.

The surveyed group included a mix of sites covering general and breaking news as well as specific topics such as lifestyle, sports or entertainment. Most organizations prefer to keep their figures private so I’m not able to share the actual sites but they are all well-known brands. I looked at referral data for 2008, 2009 and 2010 to-date and for comparison also included Facebook and Digg.

So what percentage of total site traffic came from Twitter and the other social sites? Here are the group averages:

To-date in 2010 Twitter represents an average of 0.7% of total site traffic.

10 newspaper and magazines sites is not a sufficient sample so take this survey for what it is, but the data does provide a rough idea of what major publishers are experiencing. Among the surveyed sites the highest Twitter percentage was 2.9% but the majority fell below 1%. The highs for Facebook and Digg were 2% and 7.2% respectively. The Digg percentages varied the most with straight news sites faring best.

Some notes:

• While all of the surveyed sites have some form of social media strategy none of them are doing as much as they could be. So these figures represent the experiences of typical news sites, not ones that have fully dialed in SMM.




• Despite the low percentages, to-date this year Twitter and Facebook are top 25 referrers for all of the sites and top 10 referrers for most. It is interesting that a top 10 referrer can represent such a small percentage of total site traffic. But since total monthly traffic for most of the group is in the millions, tens of millions or more those small percentages do represent substantial numbers. And if social media is bringing in traffic that the sites might not have otherwise received that’s a nice bump.




• Well-established brands still get a large portion of their traffic via direct navigation. Among the sites surveyed the figures ranged from 30-60%. Partnerships with other large content sites and cross-network promotions were another major driver.




• Natural search engine referrals ranged from about 10% to over 40% and Google.com was the #1 or #2 referring domain for nearly every site. So despite all the attention that social media deservedly gets, search is still its daddy.




• It is interesting that Digg is trending down this year. Not every site in the group was a natural fit for Digg and we are still in Q1 2010 so it is difficult to draw any strong conclusions. But even among the sites that do very well in Digg the numbers have dropped.

REQUEST:

I’d like to expand the size of the survey group, so if any newspaper or magazine professionals out there are willing to share their percentages it will be much appreciated. You can contact me via this form or direct message me on Twitter. Your anonymity will be maintained. Alternatively if anyone is willing to share their figures publicly please leave a comment below. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
2. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining
3. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook

In working on my presentation for the Twitter Marketing Tactics session at SMX West next week I’ve been looking at the various types of share and retweet buttons used on news sites.

I’m partial to the Tweetmeme button, although displaying the number of tweets is a double-edged sword. It looks great when there are a lot of retweets; when there aren’t many it can weaken user perceptions of the content.

But regardless of which tool is used, the formatting of the tweet text is something that not every site is making the most of.

When users click a retweet button, they expect to see something along the lines of:

RT @[brand] [headline] [URL]

That exact format does not need to be followed, but you want to minimize the work that users need to do before sending out the tweet. You also want to guide them toward using compelling text that will encourage further retweeting.

Some tools automatically utilize the page’s title tag instead of the headline, which can add unnecessary phrases to the tweet and force users to clean it up before sending.

In other cases no headline or descriptive text is provided, as in this example from Time:

On this Silicon Alley Insider article, clicking the Twitter link in the share toolbar brings up nothing but the full length URL, which is interesting because a shortened bit.ly URL is also displayed in the toolbar:

If users click the “Share” link on that same toolbar they are shown a second Twitter link which produces this tweet:

The problem here is that there is no branding for Silicon Alley Insider and users are less likely to click through when they don’t know the source. Also since SAI opted to use all caps in this particular headline and title tag, the resulting tweet comes off like shouting.

Finally, don’t forget to include the URL, as Newsweek did on this page:

That one is probably a technical glitch, but it’s a big one.

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
3. Smart Move from Condé Nast: GQ and DETAILS Should Have Their Own Websites

So the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints will meet in Miami for Super Bowl XLIV. NFL analysts and sports writers now have two weeks to dissect the matchup, talk about players and schemes and come up with good storylines. But I’m here to look at what really matters – which team has more reach via social media?

Now we all know that social media isn’t a numbers game – it’s not just about reach, it’s about making the most of your connections. Furthermore it’s not possible to fully quantify reach across all social media, especially since that brings up the discussion of what should or shouldn’t be considered “social media.” So I’m going to gloss over all of that and just look at four things, one for each quarter in the Super Bowl.

1st Quarter: Blog mentions
Two days after the conference championships, which team is being blogged about more?

Google Blog Search has 519,933 total results for “Indianapolis Colts” and 20,776 in the past week. For “New Orleans Saints” it’s 726,855 total and 31,215 in the past week.

On Icerocket the Colts have 24,526 total / 2,466 past week, and the Saints have 29,603 total / 3,666 past week.

And Technorati is showing 4,973 posts related to the Colts and 6,178 for the Saints.

Advantage: SAINTS

_________________

2nd Quarter: Digg
Ok, which team has seen the most activity on Digg? According to Digg’s search tool 1,549 Colts articles have been submitted, with only eight being promoted to the front page and three receiving more than 500 diggs. That compares with 1,645 articles submitted, 11 promoted and two with 500+ diggs for the Saints.

Advantage: SAINTS

…At the half, the Saints head into the locker room ahead. Can Peyton Manning and the Colts pull out another come from behind victory?

_________________

3rd Quarter: Facebook
Facebook offers one of the best ways for teams to engage with their fan base, so which team is making the most of it? As of today the Colts’ official Facebook page has 249,481 fans and their wall posts are getting a good amount of “likes” and comments. But from what I can see, and I searched with both Facebook and Google, the Saints do not have an official page. There are several unofficial pages, the largest one with 368,365 fans, but since the Saints appear to be missing the opportunity to engage Facebook users in an official capacity, this is a major fumble.

Advantage: COLTS

_________________

4th Quarter: Twitter
It gets worse on Twitter – from what I can see neither team has an official profile. So here we’ve got the equivalent of one team throwing an interception and then the other giving it right back.

There are several unofficial Twitter profiles for each team run by fans and media sites, but I could not find any official accounts. @NOScom comes close for the Saints, but this appears to be run by the people managing the team’s website, not the team itself. (Please correct me if I’m wrong).

Too bad the teams aren’t choosing to directly engage their fans via Twitter.

How about the players? Twitter-athletes.com currently lists profiles for six Colts players and 15 Saints players. Plus I suppose the Saints can count Kim Kardashian as a “spokesperson” of sorts.

So the Saints have a small edge here, but without an official presence from either team I’m calling this quarter a tie.

Advantage: NONE

_________________

WINNER:

Despite what looked like a Colts comeback, after a poor 4th quarter by both teams the winner of the Social Media Super Bowl is:

THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS

It’ll be interesting to see how these figures increase as the hype builds over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully we’ll see some creative use of social media by both the teams and some of the players. And good luck to both teams in Super Bowl XLIV.

P.S. Vikings fans, I feel your pain. You had it.

Photo credit: Steven Snodgrass (it’s a Creative Commons photo on Flickr, but I couldn’t get WordPress to link to it directly above).

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

NBA players, like many professional athletes, have taken social media by storm, but what about their teams? Fans love hearing directly from players, but they also identify strongly with the teams themselves. Twitter and Facebook offer a great opportunity for NBA teams to connect with their fans in a more personal, interactive way. So which NBA teams have the largest following on Twitter and Facebook, who is making the most of their presence?

I got good response when I looked at the most popular NFL teams on Facebook and Twitter back in November, so today I thought I’d do the same for the NBA.

In the table below the 30 NBA teams are ranked by total followers/fans on their official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. I realize these figures change quickly, but the snapshot is useful for comparison.

The Lakers and Magic are well ahead in terms of total following, which isn’t surprising considering the popularity of the two teams and their stars, and the fact that both teams were in the Finals last year.

While a number of smaller markets and weaker teams are at the bottom of the list, I didn’t expect to see the Miami Heat down there. They are competitive on Twitter in terms of reach but their lack of a real presence on Facebook sent them down to #28. It doesn’t look like they even have an official page on Facebook; the one with 599 followers was the best that I could find.

But while building up followers is great, it’s what you do with that following that really matters.

So what should NBA teams be doing on Twitter and Facebook? The most important thing is to communicate with the fans, plain and simple. Let them know what’s going on with the team, and more importantly LISTEN to what they have to say.

Beyond that there’s no right or wrong answer, but teams will certainly get a lot more traction by being compelling and interactive. Facebook pages offer a better opportunity for expanded content and extended conversations, but there’s a lot you can do with Twitter too.

A simple thing that many teams do is providing in-game updates via Twitter. As a Bulls fan living outside of Chicago I don’t get to watch many games, but I feel connected to the team when I see a scoring update:

Here are a few other things NBA teams should think about:

• Dish: offer insights and information that fans can’t get anywhere else
• Go behind the scenes: give them sense of what the organization is really like
• Humanize: not just the players, let them get to know the entire organization
• Speaking of players: the more they are involved with the team’s official social media activities, the less likely they’ll be to “go rogue” and say something regrettable on their own profiles
• Multimedia: photos and video bring sports content to life, and social media users love to share them
• Contests and promotions: tickets, gear, autographs, chances to meet players – you can quickly build buzz by giving away the good stuff
• Tie it to the community: let fans see that the team cares about the city and what’s going on there

Now if we could only get the NBA to change the first round playoff series back to five games…

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

The role of social media in professional sports is getting a lot of attention these days, unfortunately mostly in the form of teams and leagues trying to clamp down on it or players making mistakes with it.

Despite this, fans are passionately supporting and discussing their teams through a range of social media outlets, in particular Twitter and Facebook. Since we’re in the heart of football season, I thought I’d take a look at which NFL teams have the largest following on both sites.

In the table below the 32 NFL teams are ranked by the total number of followers/fans on their official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. These figures obviously change quickly but this current snapshot is useful for comparison.

Interestingly, despite no official presence on Twitter the Pittsburgh Steelers have the largest reach thanks to their large number of Facebook fans. I was also surprised that the Dallas Cowboys do not have an official Facebook page as they would certainly attract a significant number of fans.

I had expected all the teams to have more followers on Twitter. The San Diego Chargers lead the league with only 28K followers. (UPDATE: Thanks to Mike Blewitt for noticing that it is actually the New England Patriots that have the most Twitter followers at 30K+).

The New Orleans Saints and New York Giants are currently at the bottom of the social media heap with no official presence on either Twitter or Facebook. However an unofficial Saints page is very popular on Facebook with 163,760 fans.

Capturing data on only “official” accounts and pages was actually somewhat difficult (I welcome corrections if I’ve missed any). Twitter is a wild west for NFL teams right now – there are far more unofficial accounts, and even those that that claim to be official aren’t always actually so. Twitter should consider extending its “verified accounts” to team sites as well. On Facebook the official team pages are easier to identify, but they often face competition from other pages created by fans or local media. For several teams the unofficial pages have significantly more fans.

So the main takeaway is that NFL teams need to take better control of their social media presence and come up with more a cohesive engagement strategy. NFL fans are among the most passionate, so there is a great opportunity to leverage their loyalty and enthusiasm and further extend the relationships.

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. Social Media Super Bowl: Which Team Has More Reach?

While many companies now have some form of presence on Twitter, how well are they utilizing it? According to a new study by Weber Shandwick, when it comes to the Fortune 100 the answer is not so well.

Among the Fortune 100 Twitter accounts analyzed by Weber Shandwick, 53% did not convey any personality, tone or voice and 15% were either inactive or placeholders:

Additionally, 26% of the accounts were primarily used for a one-way flow of information that offered no engagement with followers, and only 9% of the accounts focused on customer service:

The end result for the Fortune 100? No so many tweets, and understandably not so many followers:

As I covered in my Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites post, there’s no “right” way to utilize Twitter. Every company needs to come up with its own customized strategy that fits its corporate culture while meeting the needs of its customer base. But since a single Twitter account cannot be all things to all people, it is important for companies to experiment with a diversified approach.

Corporations also need to make sure that the desire to play it safe does not rob their Twitter efforts of creativity. If you are not providing value to your followers (by being some combination of informative, interesting, engaging, insightful, valueable, etc.), you are going to lose your audience and the resulting opportunities from having that relationship.

Related posts:

1. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
2. Pro PR Tips: 100 PR Tips from Rafe Needleman Published as a Book
3. Twitter Suggested Users – Today’s Studio 54 Velvet Rope

With all the buzz about Twitter Lists I thought I’d take a look at how some major news sites are doing so far with their own Lists.

Looking at selection of Twitter accounts from 30 31 news sites, I checked the number of Lists that have been created and how many followers each has attracted to-date. These figures will change quite a bit in the weeks and months to come, but I wanted to capture an initial snapshot. (Note: currently Twitter allows users to create a maximum of 20 Lists.)

As can be seen it is still early days for both Twitter List creation and user adoption.

As of today half of the news sites have not created any Lists, and only four sites have more than 10. The average number of followers is still very low, and all of the Lists have less than 1,000 followers (many of them significantly less). The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Huffington Post have done the most so far with List development.

It will be interesting to see how things evolve over time.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
3. Social Media Super Bowl: Which Team Has More Reach?

I’m definitely a fan of Muck Rack – it offers an easy way to track major media journalists on Twitter and pick up on trending topics. So I’ve been curious to see how their Twitter press release service would do.

Muck Rack charges $1 per character to send out a 140 character press release, with a minimum fee of $50. Releases are posted on their press release page (and in its RSS feed) and tweeted via @muckrack, which currently has 5k+ followers.

Based on their press release page and RSS feed, since the service launched in late July they’ve distributed 51 press releases, a small number being their own. That’s an average of about 4 press releases per week, so there’s not a lot of volume yet.

Of those 51 releases, 28 included a bit.ly URL, so I tried using bit.ly search to get click data on each of those shortened URLs. My intent was to show the average number of clicks for bit.ly URLs in Muck Rack releases. Unfortunately I discovered that the “total clicks” figures bit.ly reports from its search page are not very complete or accurate (you get better data on URLs you’ve personally shortened in your history when signed into bit.ly). So I wasn’t able to learn anything meaningful there.

bit.ly search did have data on the URL in the most recent Muck Rack press release, reporting 65 clicks:

That doesn’t measure up to the hundreds or thousands of clicks that popular content often gets via Twitter, but press releases are in a different category. It’s less important how many people click and much more important who is clicking and what they are doing with the information. If you look at @muckrack’s followers there’s a mix of media and non-media professionals, so there’s certainly an opportunity for the press releases to get some exposure.

To see how Muck Rack stacks up against the competition I checked the volume of activity on some other Twitter press release services, but there aren’t a lot of apples-to-apples comparisons to be made. Much of what’s out there is established press release services that now send out releases via Twitter in addition to their main distribution methods, or services like Brian Solis’ microPR that connect PR and media professionals without the use of press releases.

Probably the closest competitor is Journalism.co.uk in the UK, which charges £30 to distribute a release through Twitter and RSS. As of today their @pressreleases Twitter account has 6,600 followers, a bit more than Muck Rack’s 5,050. Their Latest Press Releases page shows their most recent 50 releases, the oldest being from October 7th. So in less than a month they’ve distributed as many releases as Muck Rack has done in its first three months.

Of course the larger question is whether or not companies will use third-party services to distribute press releases via Twitter when they can do so for free on their own. The answer lies in how much additional value the services can provide in terms of exposure and activity.

UPDATE:
In addition to hearing from Chris Evans-Roberts of Journalism.co.uk in the comments below, today I corresponded with Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media, the company behind Muck Rack. Greg noted that they encourage users to use bit.ly so that the metrics will be open and verified by a third party. He also agreed with the notion that it’s important who sees a press release, not how many people, and that they are focused on making the service more useful for journalists to increase its value.

Related posts:

1. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
2. The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases
3. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content

This week’s Sysomos study of the 5% most active users on Twitter includes a list of the top 25 users (with more than 50,000 followers) ranked by average tweets per day.

@foxnews tops the list averaging 135.85 tweets per day. @nytimes and @time also made the top 25, averaging 39.25 and 29.22 tweets respectively.

Is 135.85 tweets a day too much? It certainly seems excessive, but the 99,703 followers of @foxnews don’t seem to think so.

While I wouldn’t go to that extreme, it does emphasize the point that just like everyone else, news organizations can use Twitter however they see fit, and Twitter users can choose to follow or not follow them accordingly.

With this in mind, it is beneficial for news and content sites to take a diversified approach to Twitter, offering a range options for users to subscribe to. While the variations are limitless, the main opportunities include:

• Content Broadcasting – this is essentially RSS feeds on Twitter, used for simply pushing out links to new content. A main profile can be set up as well as separate profiles for site sections or specific topics. While the opportunity for engagement is limited, these types of accounts do tend to attract large numbers of followers and the links do get retweeted. So there’s no reason not to set up them up as a foundation building step.
• Brand Ambassador / Personality – a person or persona that officially represents the company on Twitter. It’s a more humanized approach that offers much greater opportunity for direct engagement with users. Some sites give this responsibility to a specific individual, others create a persona – @ColonelTribune is good example of this approach. The advantage of using a persona is that multiple people can share the work, and it’s easier to make a transition when the people behind it move on.
• Individual Journalists and Bloggers – participation by the editorial staff offers a great way to engage users on a more specific, personal level. Letting readers “behind the curtain” by sharing insights into the story development process, soliciting input and providing previews or exclusive tidbits (such as additional information that didn’t make it into a particular article) is a great way to build relationships and gain a loyal following. There should certainly be policies in place to prevent missteps in this area, but there is a big upside to encouraging editorial participation.

Of course the PR and marketing staff should also play an active role in your Twitter strategy, and company employees of all kinds should be considered in the overall social media plan. But for the purposes of sharing news content and interacting with users, these three approaches offer a great start for news organizations looking to get more traction from Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter
2. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

One of the ways that higher profile Twitter accounts have built up large numbers of followers is by being included among the “suggested users” shown to users signing up for a new account:

Each new user has a group of 20 Twitter profiles suggested to them; one click of a button and they’re automatically following each one. It’s not the same 20 every time – Twitter randomly shuffles in 20 profiles from the group it has deemed worthy of recommendation.

Since new users aren’t always sure exactly how to use Twitter, this starter group can be quite helpful, so the profiles that are featured do end up getting a steady stream of new followers.

So the question is, how do you get on the list? I hear this question asked a lot now, with the most common answer being you have to know someone at Twitter. I also hear that Twitter is bombarded with requests to get on the list, so they don’t like people asking anymore.

All of this conjures up images of the infamous velvet rope at Studio 54. How cool do you have to be to get recommended by Twitter?

Photograph by Peter L. Gould, nymag.com

It’s also important to emphasize that number of followers is a very weak metric for measuring success on Twitter. It’s understandable that companies focus on this, since it’s an easy figure to monitor. However things like level of engagement, referral traffic and links to content are much more worthwhile barometers of success.

UPDATE:
After posting this today I came across a post from Twitter explaining their selection criteria: Suggested Users

I also noticed that just last night on Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan published an extensive look at who’s on the list: Who Does Twitter Love? Breaking Down The Twitter Suggested Users List

Related posts:

1. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction
2. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
3. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter

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:

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.

Related posts:

1. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page
2. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
3. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter