The value of social networks, and specifically Twitter, in engaging with audiences is something all news organisations want to understand more about, so it was intriguing to hear Newsquest Digital MD Roger Green’s view on this at yesterday’s AOP Microlocal Forum.
Explaining how some of his group’s journalists, and notably Brighton’s Jo Wadsworth, have used Twitter to great effect, Green pointed to statistics around the ratio of followers to followees of individual journalists as a way of displaying their listening prowess.
Jo, unusually, has a higher number of followees (2,346) than followers (2,135) which, Green asserted, meant that she was always listening to the readers.
In a rather pointed criticism of the UK journalists with the large follower numbers (mainly, but not exclusively, at The Guardian), Green contrasted these as examples of people who ‘liked to talk rather than listen’.
Now I’m all for bosses bigging up their staff’s achievements (and in Jo’s case it’s certainly warranted as she does indeed use Twitter very effectively and is very responsive), however, I’m not sure that the follower/followee ratio does actually demonstrate the point Green was seeking to make.
Surely the best way to tell if someone is listening is to see if they reply (and in Jo’s case she does) therefore looking at the number of RTs and @ replies to people would seem to be a more effective measure – something it’s easy to see on the public timeline but I’ve not seen demonstrated in statistical form.
My personal experience is that, once my followee number passed the Dunbar’s number, it became more tricky to effectively monitor all tweets, although the @ and DMs are still, thankfully, manageable and #tags and lists were surely invented to help us all keep track and participate effectively.
I’d be interested to hear how other people measure their activity in this area? Do you compare follower/ee ratios? What is the best measure for engagement? And most importantly, readers – how do we do?
Dim Sum Digital 
Could it be that until we got Lists, following thousands of people meant that, as journos, we were missing more stuff than we were picking up. Now there are lists to help journos sort things into more useful areas, we might see numbers rise…
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I’ve started using lists in that way certainly although I’m sure there’s more I could do there……
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I do look at ratios when I’m considering whether to follow people. If the ratio is quite high I might assume that the person in question is unlikely to follow me back, and I might as well subscribe their RSS feed in that case rather than clogging up my feed with their tweets.
It’s understandable that not everyone follows back. I don’t myself. On another feed I curate, for want of a better word, I follow most people who follow me. That figures up over a thousand now and it’s pretty tough to weed out the important ones from the chatter.
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Interesting to hear it’s an issue in choosing people to follow. I must admit I generally choose who to follow by reading back though a page or two of tweets. If they’re interesting to me on that day, I give it a go or I wait to see if they get in touch with something specific. Not v scientific is it? but hey, it’s not like we’re getting hitched for life 😉
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Me too, although I’m a bit stricter – if it is someone I don’t know, I only look at a page of their tweets to assess whether I think they are my type of Twitter person or not.
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I couldn’t keep track of as many tweets as Jo – I struggle with the 500-odd people I follow – although I think she also has two Twitter accounts, which may help.
Personally, the conversation gets too cluttered for me to be able to follow after a while – the threaded conversations options some apps offer (I use Hootsuite) are really useful, particulalry if they include people you don’t follow, and lists make a huge difference in my view.
I’m not sure that I agree with Roger Green’s argument regarding followers=listening ability.
I’d say that you can eavesdrop on Twitter very effectively and I’ve set up an RSS of my Liverpool list so I can see easily what people in the area are talking about without following them all.
And (final thought) there are conversations happening all over social networks – I got a tip about a murder via Plurk last year – sometimes it’s more practical to make yourself available to listen, than actively seek out every conversation.
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Agree with you on the struggle with just a few hundred – I wonder how Jo does it? It’s interesting to hear how people are using RSS so effectively.
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Yes, my two accounts definitely help! I use @brightonargusjo only for Brighton/Hove/Sussex people – @jowadsworth is for journalist types and friends.
I also have an RSS of mentions of Brighton, Hove, etc – although it’s now so spammy as to be next to useless.
In defence of following so many people though, I think people are more likely to respond to you asking them something if you’re already following them, rather than appearing out of the blue.
A slightly related note though – I wonder how many people have blocked Tweeting journalists? I’ve come across about three or four people who’ve blocked me. I wonder what I did wrong!
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I think we are all in awe of how you cope! On the twitter blocking, I wouldn’t consider it something you’ve done wrong, it could be that tactically someone doesn’t want to engage so directly. Their loss 🙂
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First of all, many thanks for the kind words!
It is a very good point you make about not possibly being able to keep up with all the tweets in your timeline. I made a decision early on that I wouldn’t try and make sure I read every tweet. But I did still make an effort to dip and out and respond to anything interesting which caught my eye – either replying or retweeting.
It’s interesting that Guardian journalists were singled out, as I think Jemima Kiss’s tactic of periodically apologising for not following (and with her followership, who can blame her?), but reminding people to @ her is a good one. A lot of my followers realise they’ll have to @ me to grab my attention, and don’t seem to mind doing so.
I imagine most readers will be much more likely to give stories to, or click on links from, a journalist they see regularly responding to people rather than one who follows loads of people.
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Currently following 150 people (co-incidentally in line with Dunbar’s number) and make great efforts to try and ensure I read every main tweet they make, even if it involves a big catch-up session. That may be a bit obsessive but otherwise it would feel like getting a big sack of old fashioned mail and shredding most of it because you couldn’t be bothered to open and read the letters, replying where appropriate.
Can obviously see that such an approach would be much more difficult to impossible if following hundreds or thousands more.
In terms of who I follow, I mirror Sarah’s approach…reading back around a dozen tweets to see if they’re interesting to me. Not sure how else to do it, to be honest.
As a journalist, I’m always wary of broadcasting (but still do it) and try my best to balance that. Plus always reply when asked a question and RT things which I feel should be passed on.
It can be obvious when some journalists are just skimming their Twitter feed, even when they are only following a relatively small number of people, which surely is not good news if they are really seeking to engage?
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Skimming is pretty obvious but even worse those people who never really participate and then suddenly demand information from people aged between 25-35, of photogenic appearence, preferably women, who’ll be available for a case study of same rare debilitating illness, budgetary circmstance or similar. I always wonder if anyone ever replies, or perhaps the journalist just assumes Twitter doesn’t work 😉
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I follow about a seventh of those who follow me and I struggle even with that. For me it’s about quality not quantity. I’d rather follow 10 really interesting people than 100 just to follow back out of politeness. Like Ms Kiss, I do periodically say hi to new followers, say sorry for not following back everyone and inviting them to @ me. I think I’m generally very conscientious about engaging with those who make the effort to grab my attention, although I do tend to ignore people I’ve never heard of before who tweet me a link to their cause or whatever and demand I RT it. I do RT a lot though – it’s good karma among colleagues and contact when used discriminately and I also aim to spread a lot of link love. And I try to entertain at times as well!
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I’ve come across this thread, belatedly. A reminder for me to subscribe to this blog!
At the moment, I have a similar numbers of followers and followees, though I am starting to streamline by making better use of lists and unfollowing people whose tweets are no-longer relevant to me.
Like Ian and Sarah, I tend to look at the last few tweets to decide whether or not to follow people. I look the at number of followers / followees too, but it doesn’t influence my decision that much. It’s more to decide whether or not they are likely to spam me.
I suppose my concern about unfollowing people is, if one of those people had a great story for me, they would not be able to DM me. I have sometimes offered tip-offs via DMs (for example stories in areas I can’t cover). But sometimes you can’t DM people because they are not following you, or their settings won’t allow you to.
Very impressed by the number of people Jo follows. Not sure whether I’ll be able to sustain that!
Sarah mentioned that some journalists who don’t follow all their followers are good at replying if someone mentions them. I can think of a few examples of journalists with loads of followers who make a point of replying to mentions, which is great.
I can think of one or two, however, who don’t – even when you respond to a specific request!
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I’ve come across this thread, belatedly. A reminder for me to subscribe to this blog!
At the moment, I have a similar numbers of followers and followees, though I am starting to streamline by making better use of lists and unfollowing people whose tweets are no-longer relevant to me.
Like Ian and Sarah, I tend to look at the last few tweets to decide whether or not to follow people. I look the at number of followers / followees too, but it doesn’t influence my decision that much. It’s more to decide whether or not they are likely to spam me.
I suppose my concern about unfollowing people is, if one of those people had a great story for me, they would not be able to DM me. I have sometimes offered tip-offs via DMs (for example stories in areas I can’t cover). But sometimes you can’t DM people because they are not following you, or their settings won’t allow you to.
Very impressed by the number of people Jo follows. Not sure whether I’ll be able to sustain that!
Sarah mentioned that some journalists who don’t follow all their followers are good at replying if someone mentions them. I can think of a few examples of journalists with loads of followers who make a point of replying to mentions, which is great.
I can think of one or two, however, who don’t – even when you respond to a specific request!
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