e-commerce & social media

Following on from yesterday’s look at the biggest sites on Facebook during October, here are the publishers that best managed to use Twitter to spread their stories and reach new readers in October.

In September’s Twitter rankings, we asked if October would be the month that the BBC would see more than 4 millions tweets for the first time. The answer, according to data from Spike:Yep, the BBC break the 4 million tweet mark for the first time, Mashable record an impressive 842 average tweets per story throughout October, CNN and the Guardian overtake ABC News to take third and fourth place,

All top ten sites achieve over 1 million tweets, Russia Today enter the charts at 25th....

Via Jeff Domansky

The Verge editors think sharing analytics with reporters might distract them from quality storytelling. Other media outlets think differently.

While many news organizations freely share site metrics with their staff members, the growing availability of pageview and engagement data raises thorny news judgment questions that editors and reporters are grappling with on a daily basis.

Some sites, such as Gawker, have experimented with making pageviews a core part of reporters’ jobs by basing some aspects of pay on how much traffic their stories get, while others, such as The Verge, prefer their reporters avoid  the temptation to pander to what’s popular. Still others take a middle road, allowing limited access to metrics....

Via Jeff Domansky

This week we used Insights data to see how some different business sites are performing on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter during the month of September to yesterday (September 1 to 24).

Business news is hotly discussed in the social space. Some of the most talked about digital news sites of recent times (Business Insider, Quartz) cover business daily, while stalwarts like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes have also made themselves very visible in the new social landscape.

We picked seven prominent sites and ran some queries in our Insights dashboard:

The Financial Times

The Wall Street Journal

Quartz

Business Insider

Harvard Business Review

Forbes

Bloomberg.com

We used the data to analyze the biggest stories by network, the most ‘social’ writers at different sites, and overall site performance. Insights also allowed us to graph their average share counts per story....

Via Jeff Domansky