Barkha Dutt of the Washington Post is the most-engaged top journalist on Twitter. 64% of the reporter’s tweets are at-replies. That’s how to use Twitter–as an engagement platform, not a broadcast platform.
How do the other most-followed journalists on Twitter rate with their response level? Poynter published a list of the the most-followed journalists on Twitter:
- Anderson Cooper, CNN: 9.26 million followers
- Rachel Maddow, MSNBC: 7.08 million followers
- Barkha Dutt, The Washington Post: 5.95 million followers
- Rajdeep Sardesai, India Today: 5.94 million followers
- Bill Simmons, The Ringer: 5.73 million followers
- Michael Wilbon, ESPN: 4.01 million followers
- Stephen A. Smith, ESPN: 3.3 million followers
- Nina Garcia, Marie Claire: 3.27 million followers
- Rahul Kanwal, India Today: 3.08 million followers
- Erin Andrews, ESPN: 3 million followers
Anderson Cooper has the most followers, and he’s pretty engaged. Of his 3,000 recent tweets, 24% are at-replies. Not too bad! He replies most to @kidswishnetwork, @Andy, and @kidswishnetwork.
Rachel Maddow is another story. She’s the second-most followed journalist on Twitter. Yet, of her 3,000 recent tweets, only 1% are at-replies. Rachel! You gotta engage with your followers! She has only 20 at-replies. 19 of them are to herself. One is to @tedcruz. Wow.
Of the top ten most-followed journalists on Twitter, here are the journalists who are most engaged, and least engaged.
If you’d like to see what your reply rate is, head on over to twitonomy. They give you a ton of interesting information about your profile, or anyone else’s profile. I use the free version of their service, and it still gives you lots of information. I used their service to uncover these reply rates.
I’m proud of the reply rates for my Twitter accounts.
- @mattmaldre: 54%
- @spudart: 48%
- @57hits: 23%
- @mightymauler: 45%
What’s your reply rate?