The Register is most tweeted IT Trade

At the end of last year I started wondering what percentage of a publication’s readership actually shares content online. So for the last few months I’ve been keeping tabs on 11 of the UK’s most popular IT trades. This is the first in a series of posts, which will look at my findings.

Whilst I appreciate that people share content in a variety of different ways, I have focused my efforts solely on Twitter. I thought the site would give a good indication of how much content people are sharing without requiring the immense amount of time that would be needed to analyse several social networks and bookmarking sites.

The results of my three month study are interesting. On average, each of the IT trades are tweeted about 2,868 times a month. The Register is the most tweeted about IT Trade, racking up 21,719 tweets by its readers per month – more than 7.5 times as much as the average. And almost 37 times as much as the least tweeted publication.

By comparing the average number of tweets with the number of unique users that Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner says each each publication receives, I found that just 4.18 per cent of each publication’s readership is tweeting links to articles. Computer Weekly has the highest percentage, with a possible 9.06 per cent of users tweeting about articles on the site. However it’s likely that both figures are much lower in reality, as people may tweet more than one link each per month.

Interestingly, IT PRO has the most followers on Twitter, with 12,901 people following its account. The average IT trade has 3,748 followers. This suggests that the number of people following a publication’s Twitter account isn’t the only factor that impacts how much content people share on the social networking site.

A whole host of things can encourage people to share content – frequency of tweets, relevancy and newsworthiness of content on the site, whether or not social sharing buttons are available on the site, which buttons are on offer, where the buttons are positioned, the size and type of readership that each publications has, and of course, which social networks they use most.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think makes people want to share content? And how can publications encourage more visitors to share links with their network.