Riding a strong July for sports in the UK, the BBC pushed its advantage as the most tweeted publisher on the internet. BBC content was tweeted 3.9 million times, according to data from NewsWhip, a platform that tracks content shared on social networks.
BBC’s total was 400,000 more than it registered in June, extending its lead to one million over the second-place New York Times. BBC’s most tweeted article, with nearly 12,000 tweets, was a live blog of the Wimbledon men’s final between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. A story about the English women’s soccer team in the World Cup semifinal got nearly 11,000 tweets. It also helps that the media giant has a deep well of content, producing more than 33,000 articles July, four times as many as The New York Times.
Conservative news sites that surged in NewsWhip’s July Facebook engagement results also did well on Twitter, though in a more modest way. Fox News, second on Facebook, moved from 14th to ninth in the Twitter rankings, and Breitbart.com moved into the top 25.
The top 10 was dominated by traditional media organizations, with The Guardian (fourth), NBC (sixth), CNN (seventh) and Forbes (eighth) joining the BBC, The NYT and Fox. Business Insider made a big leap from 16th in June to 10th.
Among the reasons that traditional publishers rank high on the list is quantity of output. Third-place Mashable, a site that seeks out socially focused news, gets a lot more per-story tweets for its buck. Among NewsWhip’s top 25, Mashable leads in average tweets per story, with 863. That’s about 750 more than the average BBC story.
When the data, which NewsWhip pulls from its Spike content discovery platform, is parsed by average tweets per story, CNN and Forbes are the only legacy media sites that make the cut:
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