Almighty Link

After compiling yesterday’s list of the most influential U.S. newspapers on Twitter, based on their Klout scores, I thought it would be interesting to see how some online information sites compare. Here are some apples-to-oranges observations.

• @mashable, with a Klout score of 87, is as influential as New York Times, and more influential than any other publication on the list.
• @wikileaks and @techcrunch, with Klout scores of 85 (Wikileaks and TechCrunch),  are more influential than Wall Street Journal.
• @tmz and @gizmodo, with Klout scores of 80 (TMZ and Gizmodo), are more influential than New York Post and USA Today.
• @tbd, with a Klout score of 68, is more influential than Washington Post.
• @thedailybeast, with a Klout score of 78,  is more influential than the Boston Globe and Miami Herald.
• @propublica, with a Klout score of 73,  is more influential than the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune.

If you found this interesting, here are other  pages you might want to read:

• What is the Klout Score? Understanding the Influence Metric
• The Top 25 Newspapers on Twitter — Who’s Up, Who’s Down
• The top newspapers on Twitter? Try this list
• Mashable leads Twitter influence list
• Sites: Mashable, Wikileaks, TechCrunch, TMZ, Gizmodo,TBD, The Daily Beast, ProPublica

I ran a handful of newspaper Twitter accounts through Klout this morning to measure their social media influence. Klout uses “35 variables on Facebook and Twitter” to create a score that it describes as a measurement of “overall online influence.”

After Dylan Stableford (@stableford) published a list of top 25 newspapers on Twitter,  based on print circulation, Mathilde Piard  (@mathildepiard) followed with her own list of top newspapers on Twitter that “goes by number of followers on Twitter, not circulation.” I used the accounts from those posts to create the list below. Make sure to read those posts to learn about the selection process.

Here are the numbers. Click on a Twitter username to visit the account. Click on a Klout score for details about that measurement. Oh, and feel free to see the data in this Google Doc.

If the front page ain’t what it used to be, then how does a journalist get a story on those new front pages? First, accept that the reader is the now the front page editor. Then, make sure your editor knows when you’ve created a new piece of content, and why it is worthy of front page consideration.

1. Twitter: Add a tweet button to your story and create content that people want to share with their friends.
2. Facebook: Add a “like” button to your post and create content that people want to share with their friends.
3. Search: Make sure your stories include words that people might use when searching for the information that you’ve provided, and create content to which people want to link.
4. Text (messaging): Create content that people want to share with their friends.
5. Tablet: Create content that people want to share with their friends.
6. RSS: Make sure readers can easily subscribe to your RSS feed and create a stream of content to which people want to subscribe.
7. Time shifters: Add a “read later” button and create content that people will want to read later.

Oh, and make sure you know in which publications you want to appear, and don’t write to appear in other publications. In old school terms, don’t write for Playboy if you want to appear in the Washington Post.

The number of “likes” usually displayed alongside the Facebook like button is really an aggregate of shares, likes and comments. This morning, I took an arbitrary mix of Facebook related stories and found that the actual number of likes only accounted for a 39% of the number displayed. This is by no means scientific, but I think it’s noteworthy.

Why does this matter? Because news sites are publishing factual inaccuracies in articles that say things like “100 people recommend this” when in fact only 39 people did.

Here are the stories that I looked at this morning:

• CNN: Facebook event: Let’s dump trash at Boehner’s pad
  Claim: 2,071 recommends. Actual: 650 recommends (plus 769 shares and 653 comments)
• GigaOm: Facebook Open Sources Its Servers and Data Centers
  Claim: 593 likes. Actual: 291 (plus 232 shares and 70 comments)
• TechCrunch: Facebook’s “Open Compute Project”: Their Server/Datacenter Expertise Now Open To All
  Claim: 580 likes. Actual: 386 likes (plus 150 share and 44 comments)
• Mashable: Homeland Security to Issue Terror Warnings via Facebook & Twitter
  Claim: 578 likes. Actual: 120 likes (plus 245 shares and 213 comments)
• Politico: Joe Biden’s daughter trashes birther Donald Trump
  Claim: 143 like. Actual: 70 likes (plus 47 share and 26 comments)
• Engadget: LikeLight lights up your likes with Legos, Arduino (video)
  Claim: 143 likes. Actual: 70 likes (plus 54 shares and 19 comments)
• Today: New tool helps clean up your Facebook reputation
  Claim: 106 recommends. Actual: 40 recommends (plus 50 shares and 16 comments)
• WSJ Digits: Facebook Won’t Become E-Commerce Force, Analyst Says
  Claim: 101 likes. Actual: 34 likes (plus 51 shares and 16 comments)
• TIME: Obama Opens 2012 Campaign on Facebook
  Claim: 96 likes. Actual: 34 likes (plus 48 shares and 14 comments)
• USA Today: Facebook plea persuades man to donate a kidney
  Claim: 94 recommends. Actual: 51 recommends (plus 28 shares and 15 comments)
• All things D: Facebook’s Rise Is a Big Deal for Media Sites. For the Rest of the Web, Not So Much.
  Claim: 55 likes. Actual: 22 likes (plus 24 shares and 9 comments)
• Slate: No More Privacy Paranoia
  Claim: 62 likes. Actual: 22 likes (plus 32 shares and 8 comments)

All told, the like buttons claimed that those pages were liked or recommended 4,622 times. In fact, they were liked or recommended only 1,790 times.

In case you didn’t click on the first link in this post, I got the real “like” numbers by using my RealShare tool.

Feel free to take a look at the data in my malformed Google Doc.