Blogger Malcolm Coles has studied how often UK newspapers have had links to their articles 'tweeted' by others in the last four months and found that the Guardian comes out far ahead of the competition.

Many newspapers regularly use Twitter to publicise their articles by tweeting a link with a short, catchy headline, and one of the advantages of this type of marketing is that it is viral: many users tend to 'retweet' links to the articles that they enjoy. So while the Guardian has only tweeted 44,900 times about its own URLs, Cole found, other people have tweeted links to Guardian articles 328,288 times. So it seems that the Guardian's readers are definitely doing some of its promotional work for it.

As a comparison, the Telegraph tweets 114,100 links to its own stories and 120,731 are tweeted by others, and for the Times, the figures are 48,130 and 23,329 respectively. For Coles' whole table see here.

Coles used BackTweets to find these figures, a service that allows a user to check how often a domain or URL is tweeted. Coles cannot promise 100% accuracy on the statistics, but they do give a good idea of which papers are benefiting more from Twitter in terms of how many times their articles might be read.

The Guardian's Tech account on Twitter has the most followers of any UK newspaper account: 893,439 at time of publishing. So even if the paper's team send fewer tweets out themselves, the chances of retweets are high. And it is probable that many those followers of the Tech account are tech-savvy and fans of Twitter, and therefore arguably more likely to use the service more accurately.

As well as for publicising articles, there are other ways in which journalists can use Twitter. It can be an extremely useful journalistic resource: reporters can use it to watch for breaking news and as a real time search for information. It has proved particularly useful in situations where information is hard to locate, such as during the recent conflict following the Iranian election on June 12. Twitter can also be used to seek reader feedback and to increase journalists' interaction with their audience.

Source: Malcolm Coles