The Business insider just posted a blog noting that Mashable is now bigger than Techcrunch. Leaving aside the topic of blogs writing about blogs writing about blogs, one line does jump out of the post: “How did they do it? A dominating Twitter presence”.
At OneRiot HQ, we’ve been casually observing the way traditional media uses Twitter to attract readers to their online content. We do that with a neat feature on our search pages that shows “first found” for each result - i.e. who shared the link first on the social web - along with the total number of shares. For example, when you search for “www.guardian.co.uk” on OneRiot you see the articles from The Guardian that have most social buzz right now… but you also see who shared them first, and how many total shares they have received.
Leaving aside the topic of blogs writing about blogs writing about blogs, one line does jump out of the post: “How did they do it? A dominating Twitter presence”.
A spot check just now shows a typical pattern for The Guardian (a more detailed analysis will be come in a future post). We tend find very fresh content from The Guardian – the latest stories from news, sports and politics - but not very large share counts. In other words, Guardian stories rarely “go viral”; not many people share them on the social web. And when you look at the “first share” data you get some hints as to why. Stories tend to be shared first by journalists on the paper - to their credit - but those journalists don’t have many followers. As a consequence, the stories never really “take off” from this launch pad. In this screen shot, Ian Traynor (@traynorbrussels) The Guardian’s Europe Editor, shares a story headlined “Misery for Social Democrats”, but he’s only followed by 13 people. Meanwhile sports editor Sean Ingle (@seaningle, or “Seany” as he gets called on the excellent Guardian Football Weekly podcasts) shares a story about Liverpool Football Club’s financial woes, but he is followed by less than 200 folks. If a tree falls in an empty forest…
So, on current form, you would never see the phrases “The Guardian” and “How did they do it? A dominating Twitter presence” in the same sentence. Apart from that one, but you get the point.
Now, to the two titans of tech blogging. If you do a similar search for “www.techcrunch.com” you’ll see much better share counts than The Guardian:
….but way less than you see if you search for Mashable.
It’s also noticeable that Mashable tend to share their articles from @mashable, which is followed by almost 100,000 more twitters than @techcrunch (780k and 680k respectively). Now that’s a launching pad to shoot a story through the stratopshere of social media!
Of course, we need to dig much, much deeper than we have in this post to get to the root of Mashable’s success, or to give The Guardian some decent tips. For example, Mashable’s editorial style (lots of “how to”s and “X things that are awesome”) is perfectly tuned to resonate with social web sharers. Nevertheless, even at this superficial level, it’s fascinating stuff.
