On 5 August 2008 I started @SGnews to automatically update news about Singapore over Twitter. Today, @SGnews has 1,535 followers. In March this year, I began tracking each news story’s link with Snipurl and since then I’ve collected a lot of data. This blog post will show you what readers of Singapore News on Twitter we up to in the month of April 2009.
For the month of April, there were a total of 970 links that were clicked. This is not all the news that came through on the account, only those that were clicked on. Most of the clicks went to Channel NewsAsia followed by The Straits Times.
The above chart is the complete view of the activity throughout the month. Judging by the stacked chart, the number of unique clicks almost shadow exactly the total clicks. This likely means the majority of users actively click the links when the news comes through @SGnews with only a small margin who click on news that was passed around by retweets.
Breaking the data down by days, we can see that the strongest day for @SGnews was Friday, April 24, 2009 with a total of 1,923 clicks. The lowest day was Saturday, April 11, 2009. It appears that even on Twitter news reading followed the usual curves where more activity is found mid-week and weekends are valleys.
Below are the Top 10 Articles from April. Interestingly, the AWARE Saga did make it into the Top 10, but it lingered toward to bottom. Maybe because it was only the beginning of the saga with the peak of the issue flowing over to May.
Top 10 Articles on @SGnews
| Rank | Article Title | Source | Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Online Only – Singlish: cause for concern | TODAY Online | 172 |
| 2 | A piece of Singapore history found on YouTube | Channel NewsAsia | 168 |
| 3 | Freak storm wreaks havoc | The Straits Times | 161 |
| 4 | Jackie slams S’poreans | The Straits Times | 135 |
| 5 | Microsoft allegedly stole S’pore firm’s patented invention | Channel NewsAsia | 123 |
| 6 | New club in town | The Straits Times | 101 |
| 7 | 150 AWARE members seek vote of no confidence in new executive committee | Channel NewsAsia | 94 |
| 8 | Government won’t interfere in AWARE saga | Channel NewsAsia | 93 |
| 9 | Two bodies found | The Straits Times | 85 |
| 10 | Survey shows Singapore in bottom 10 of salary rise rankings | Channel NewsAsia | 83 |
Filed under: Singapore, Social Media
[...] @SGnews stats for April 2009 [...]
Interesting! I’ve always doubted sites / channels that just aggregate news from various channels. I have a friend who would go through the national newspaper daily and literally copy and paste FULL articles he thought was important to the country and put it up on his blog. His blog ranking is really low with almost no trackbacks but one day he linked to me in one of his posts and that generated about 120 click-throughs within 3 hours. In other words, there are quite a lot of people out there who want to save the trouble of scheming through news.
@bitbot: Yes, news will always be one of the most sought after media. Humans have an innate desire to know what’s been happening around them. News will never go away, but the means by which to get it will evolve with communication technology. Be it from your friend’s blog, this Twitter feed, etc. If technology could project a floating ticker in front of every person everywhere they walked, I’m sure news will be there too. =)