The growth of social media usage is by now well known and well documented. But publishers and broadcasters are also increasingly interested in building a social media presence.

For media brands who are used to talking to large audiences, a platform like
Twitter seems to provide new opportunities to create deeper levels of engagement and loyalty, as well as to reach wider audiences through word of mouth and ‘earned’ media.
So, to see how different types of media owners are performing, at Starcom MediaVestGroup London we have been using Echo (our suite of social media analysis tools) to take a look at a number of different titles across four categories to see what they were doing on Twitter— and how their audiences were reacting.

Compared to a typical analysis of users’ social media profiles, for a media brand which is already reaching an audience of thousands of (usually paying) readers, the popularity contest of ‘who has the most friends’ is less interesting. Instead, we wanted to understand how people were actively engaging with these brands; there is obviously a huge difference between a follower who might only log in once a week and one who is glued to their Twitter feed and never misses a tweet.

With over a quarter of a million tweets from 71 different accounts, this is a summary of what we found to be the most interesting findings from mens’ magazines, Womens magazines, sports and music and film.

Music and film mags are the most engaging Although Sport gets the greatest number of overall retweets, these titles are also putting out a large number of tweets. So looking at numbers of “retweets per tweet” as a measure of audience engagement with the account (rather than with the bigger headline stories), the music and film genre is the most popular, followed by sports, womens mags and mens mags.

Sky Sports News dominates Sport

With nearly 10,000 retweets in a typical week, @SkySportsNews dominates the Sporting twitterers we looked at, with @BBCSport coming second, and @Guardian_sport also doing well. But @SkySportsNews also stands out as having greater engagement from a lower volume of tweets- 75 in a typical week- considerably less than either the BBC (225) or the Guardian’s (227) sport accounts.

NME is the leader of the music pack

Showing by far the greatest level of engagement with the audience.
Quite a different picture to the Sports world, as not only does the NME get considerably more engagement in the form of retweets, but is also much more active, with an average of 19 tweets a day- more than most other music titles are tweeting in a typical week.

Meanwhile, film titles (like @EmpireMagazine and @TotalFilm) are similarly high-volume tweeters to the NME, but not seeing nearly as much engagement from their audiences.

The charts below illustrate the different levels of engagement, showing each tweet as a point, with the vertical axis showing the number of retweets – more dots higher up indicates a greater level of engagement. (Note- all 3 charts are to the same scale for clearer comparison- a handful of outliers with more than 1,000 retweets have been omitted for clarity.)

Heatworld owns the women’s mags market

In the women’s magazines market, the significance of measuring engagement becomes clear. Although @MarieClaire has a much higher number of followers (perhaps due to being a global brand), this isn’t resulting in high levels of engagement.

But by far the greatest levels of engagement (measured either in total numbers of
retweets or number of retweets of their ‘average’ tweet) is @Heatworld. Despite only having about a third as many followers as @MarieClaire, @HeatWorld is seeing over 500 retweets in a typical day- almost 5 times as many as @MarieClaire.

At the other end of the scale is @GlamourMagUK, who are putting out a lot of content (about twice as much as @Heatworld), but not seeing very much engagement with their audience.

Men’s mags are still an open game

Unlike the other categories, men’s mags don’t have a clear leader. We put the following mens mag accounts into our system; @ZOO_UK, @nuts_official, @FHM, @Esquiremag, @GQRecommends, @loadedmag, @frontmag,@MensHealthUK and @MensFitnessMag.

Esquire and Mens Health are both seeing significant levels of engagement. They both did well in terms of getting considerably more retweets than the others – but were still quite a long way short of titles in other categories, so we didn’t really spend as much time looking into them in depth.

GQ (like Glamour) is putting out a lot of content, but not seeing very much engagement.

At the lads end of the market, I’d say that Nuts is doing better than Zoo, in that they are putting out a lot less, but getting more retweets.

Loaded might have faded in terms of sales but it still seems to be getting the most engagement- about x1.5 more retweets, despite putting out even less content. Still some way short of Esquire though.