Journalists most active, largest group on Twitter

Journalists form the largest and most active verified group on Twitter, making up nearly a quarter of the micro-blogging site’s authenticated users, according to a new study.

Despite being most active on Twitter, journalists have comparatively less followers — on an average 1,40,000 — as against 1.2 million followers of musicians.

The report is based on a sample of 15,000 verified Twitter accounts which shows that journalists make up nearly a quarter (24.6 per cent) of the service’s authenticated users.

The next-largest category is sports teams and athletes (17.9 per cent) followed by actors and entertainers (13.6 per cent), a report of Britain-based start-up Triggertrap published on medium.com said.

The report also says journalists and news organisations are the most active group on Twitter, a claim it supports with two metrics, follower ratios and number of tweets.

News organisations and journalists tweet frequently about the content they produce and consume, and verified journalists follow more users on average compared to other verified groups in the Twitterverse, Haje Jan Kamps, CEO of Triggertrap said.

When taking a closer look at who is most active on Twitter, things are suddenly making more sense again. It makes sense that media properties (blogs, big news organisations, etc) and journalists tweet a lot about content they have created and breaking news.

This might be the reason why Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recently thanked journalists for making the social media platform into a destination for news while celebrating the social network’s ninth birthday.

He had thanked reporters and editors who helped turn the micro-blogging site from a stream of 140-character updates to a river of news and commentary. “So many around the world have helped make Twitter what it is, but there’s one group I’d like to thank today: journalists,” he had tweeted earlier this month.

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