Mainstream media Twitter accounts rarely retweet others, don’t respond to people and largely focus on promoting their own links, finds a new study from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. The study examined tweets from @nytimes, @cnn, @foxnews, @msnbc and several other larger media accounts, and it revealed “limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.”
Here’s a breakdown of more than 3,600 tweets for a week in February. 93% of tweets linked to the media organization’s own site, and just over 1% linked to another site. 6% did not contain links. “Both the sharing of outside content and engagement with followers are rare,” the study explains. “The news content posted, moreover, matches closely the news events given priority on the news organizations’ legacy platforms.” Pew adds, “For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.”
As far as retweets, Pew broke them down by news organization. “Only 9% of the tweets examined were retweets. Of these, 90% originally appeared on another Twitter feed connected to the same news organization such as a section feed, reporter’s feed or, in the case of television networks, another show on the network,” explains the study. “In all, only 1% of tweets studied originated from an entity outside the news organization.”
Use of hashtags is also rare, as well as using Twitter as a reporting tool. With the exception of Fox News, news organizations rarely asked their Twitter followers for information or feedback. “While it is unknown how much feedback is actually received from these tweets, engagement with those followers appears to be a bigger part of the Fox News Twitter strategy,” the study said.
Despite the limited use of the platform, media Twitter accounts grew quickly for the better part of the year, growing an average of 65% during the eight-month period. While Pew didn’t offer an explanation why, it’s clear that media organizations are investing in Twitter promotion — especially the TV accounts, which are plugging them and displaying tweets on air.
“This behavior resembles the early days of the web,” the study concludes. “Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain. Now, the idea is that being a service-of providing users with what they are looking for even if it comes from someone else-carries more weight. It bears watching whether Twitter use for mainstream news organizations evolves in this same way.”
We’re trying to evolve at my day job, @breakingnews (which is owned by msnbc but not included in the study.) Since we’re source-agnostic — we link the originator of breaking stories whenever possible — we rarely link ourselves (1%) and include a healthy number of retweets to other news organizations (10%) and eyewitnesses/sources (5%). We’ve extended that same philosophy to our website, mobile apps and other social accounts. But clearly, doing this on a new brand is much easier than adopting it inside a legacy branded Twitter account — not to mention, it does require an investment of human resources, rather than just auto-tweeting new stories.