It’s not breaking news that most U.S. newspapers tweet.
In fact most daily newspapers have multiple Twitter accounts used to micro blog about the latest news and occasionally interact with readers.
But some newspapers are better at navigating the Twittersphere than others, according to a new report on newspapers’ and journalists’ use of Twitter from Internet communications firm The Bivings Group in Washington, D.C.
According to the report, which analyzed 300 Twitter accounts (including those of individual journalists) from 100 top U.S. newspapers, papers take a variety of different approaches when it comes to how often and what they tweet.
For one thing, about two-fifths of newspapers failed to display a link to their Twitter accounts anywhere on their Web sites. Over half of the 100 daily newspapers studied in the report, however, kept a directory of all Twitter accounts on their Web sites.
For instance, it takes some searching, but Boston.com has a link on its home page where all 19 of its Twitter accounts, (including @BostonUpdate, which has over 11,000 followers) are displayed. The Boston Phoenix, (over 7,000 followers) meanwhile has a Twitter link prominently displayed at the top of its home page.
Twitter’s average newspaper account had about 17,717 followers, according to the report. However, if the four accounts with over 100,000 followers were removed, the average number of followers plummets to about 3,400.
The New York Times, which has nearly 2 million followers, tops the list of “most retweeted” Twitter accounts, which means that the newspaper’s tweets were repeated the most compared with other papers, according to data from eMarketer.com.
And while many individual journalists are avid Twitter users, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof seems to be the Twitter gold standard for newspaper writers. Kristof has nearly 900,000 followers and tweets several times a day.
The Bivings Group noted that newspapers usually average about 11 tweets per day, although “tweet frequency” varies from 1.1 per day (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture and the Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets per day (The Boston Herald).
Shameless plug here. The Boston Business Journal tweets from @BBJNewsroom. And we promise to tweet less than 95 times per day.