Most Popular Newspapers on Twitter: Guess Who’s #1?

Which US newspaper do you think is tops on Twitter? A new study by Searchmetrics reveals the leaders: The Washington Post, The New York Times and USA Today. These top three received the most mentions on Twitter in 2013; USA Today and the Washington Post also dominated the list of the top 10 most-tweeted newspaper website stories in 2013.

The Washington Post: most tweeted newspaper

The study ranked leading US newspaper sites by the number of tweets per week that were generated by the content on each site. Here are the top 10: 

  1. Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com): 275,193 tweets per week
  2. New York Times (www.nytimes.com): 261,422 tweets per week
  3. USA Today (www.usatoday.com): 149,960 tweets per week
  4. Wall Street Journal (online.wsj.com): 134,248 tweets per week
  5. Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com): 118,911 tweets per week
  6. New York Daily News (www.nydailynews.com): 51,877 tweets per week
  7. Chicago Tribune (www.chicagotribune.com): 17,777 tweets per week
  8. New York Post (www.nypost.com): 13,532 tweets per week
  9. Denver Post (www.denverpost.com): 8,887 tweets per week
  10. Chicago Sun-Times (www.suntimes.com): 4,982 tweets per week

One USA Today article was the most tweeted newspaper website story of the year, with 408,816 tweets during 2013.  USA Today published four of the ten most tweeted stories in 2013; the Washington Post is responsible for five. See the press release for a full list of these stories.

Clearly, users are consuming – and sharing – news via Twitter.  Can newspapers do more to drive additional traffic to their content from the social platform?