Twitter key to UK political journalists’ coverage of US presidential election says Lissted data

RealWire has used its Twitter-based media relations platform, Lissted, to analyse media chatter about the US presidential election. The analysis looked at references to Obama and Romney in UK media tweets over a twenty-four hour period* during and after voting.

The data shows that of over 25,000 tweets by UK political/current affairs journalists and bloggers during the period, approximately 1 in 6 mentioned the presidential candidates.

RealWire also looked at which UK political journalists and bloggers tweeted the most about the presidential candidates during this time.

Among the top ten were six members of Lissted’s recently published list of the Top 100 UK Political Journalists and Bloggers on Twitter (Dan Hodges, Paul Waugh, Mark Ferguson, Andrew Neil, Jonathan Freedland and Tim Gatt) with Dan Hodges, commentator for the Telegraph, New Statesman and Total Politics leading the way with 79 related tweets.

Position	Name	Role/Outlet	Mentions
1	Dan Hodges	Commentator, Telegraph; New Statesman; Total Politics	79
2	Johnny Paige	Video Journalist, The Guardian	75
3	Paul Waugh	Editor, Politics Home	71
4	Patrick McPartlin	Journalist, Scotsman Online	67
5	Mark Ferguson	Editor, Labour List	60
6	Andrew Neil	Presenter, BBC	58
7	David Ottewell	Head of Politics, Manchester Evening News	55
8	Jonathan Freedland	Columnist, The Guardian	54
Joint 9th	Tim Gatt	Digital Output Editor, ITV News	52
Joint 9th	Amol Rajan	Deputy Editor, Independent Online	52

The importance of media commentary on Twitter was highlighted today by John Rentoul, chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday (and another Top 100 list member). Writing in The Independent, he concluded that “the election was fought on television, but the commentary was fought on Twitter.”

RealWire Chief Executive Adam Parker, who gathered and analysed the data, believes that the results confirm the value of Twitter in media relations and public affairs; "The amount of conversation on Twitter about the US election from UK political journalists is just more evidence of what many already accept: that news breaks first on Twitter, and that it has become an essential source of commentary from authoritative journalists.” 

*Data sample

• Period: 12:00pm GMT November 6th and 12:00pm GMT November 7th

• 2,063 UK** Political/current affairs journalists and bloggers on Lissted

• 1,506 of these journalists/bloggers tweeted at least once during the 24-hour period

• 25,411: Total tweets by these 1,506 people during the period

**N.B. Journalists are classified ‘UK’ if they write for a UK-based media outlet, regardless of their personal location 

About Lissted
Lissted is a ground-breaking web application that seeks to modernise media relations by making it easy for PR, marketing and media professionals to find, listen to and engage with the media on Twitter.

Based on a growing database of over 17,000 journalists, media professionals and outlets on Twitter, Lissted dynamically streams and indexes up to 250,000 tweets per day, monitoring conversations in real-time for subject, content and even any links that are shared. Every profile has been individually curated by the RealWire team, researching each individual’s interests, geography, outlet and role.

About RealWire
RealWire is an award-winning online press release distribution service with over 10 years of experience, and is first choice for many of the UK’s top digital PR and internet marketing professionals. RealWire’s service can increase your story’s coverage and improve your SEO.

The UK’s leading innovator in press release distribution, RealWire introduced the Social Media News Release in 2007, PR targeting system PRFilter in 2010, and the Twitter-based media relations platform Lissted in 2012.

realwire's social media news release is based on the original Social Media News Release Template from Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications.