How a story breaks on Twitter

In the second part of his investigation into Twitter and newsbrands, YouGov’s Shaun Austin uses insights from a new international study to reveal how a story breaks on the social media platform.

Earlier this week I looked at the types of news accounts followed by the UK Twitter population. However, while Twitter has changed the way we access and disseminate news, almost as important is the distinct way different types of news stories play out through the medium.

In this article I will analyse two stories from 2014 to see the different ways they developed on Twitter. The first is the Oscars and the second is a speech by Labour leader Ed Miliband outlining his party’s position on an EU referendum.

YouGov’s analysis shows the way news stories develop on Twitter over a long time period, and how the interventions of key accounts can help a particular story achieve critical mass.

The Oscars

Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres broke a Twitter record for the most retweets of a single picture and message (3.4 million). But in terms of driving reach in the UK, this ‘selfie’ came relatively late in the day.

The chart below shows the cumulative reach on Twitter for those being exposed to the Oscars in the lead up to the awards ceremony – and the accounts that drove the most additional reach to the story.

With the exception of Amazon UK (which notably promoted the films on its service), it is mainly media accounts that deal with celebrity and fashion – such as ITV’s Daybreak and Heatworld – which stand out the most in the lead-up to the event.

The sharpest increase in cumulative reach for the Oscars story occurs at around midnight in the UK. DeGeneres’s account does not appear at this stage because she had already talked about the awards in the lead up to the ceremony and further tweets by her didn’t increase unique reach any further. However, when Kevin Spacey tweeted about the picture shortly afterwards there was some further incremental reach.

When the actual ceremony started, a news organisation account – BBC Breaking News – posted a tweet encouraging users to follow the news of the Oscars live. Given that up to this point the majority of tweets came from entertainment journalists and celebrities, the increase in cumulative reach was relatively large due to the differing profile of people following this mainstream news organisation. By the time the event itself began at 12:30, 74% of the Twitter population of the UK had been exposed to it – with most first exposures coming from celebrity sites.

Labour and the EU

A couple of weeks after the Oscars we tracked another type of news story – Ed Miliband’s speech about the European referendum – as it emerged through Twitter. As we will see, the way the story spread was different to the Academy Awards in a number of ways.

This story built up slowly through largely specialist sources including political parties. The spark came from a report by the Reuters news agency that the Labour party was preparing to change its policy on the European Union by pledging to hold a referendum if elected in 2015. Interestingly the story originated in The Times newspaper (quoting an unnamed political source) but the newsbrand’s influence on Twitter is limited by the use of a hard paywall.

Further discussion was generated after commentary by the Labour news feed and the New Statesman, but for about a week the story remained niche – being talked about by a select number of political and news accounts and reaching only about a fifth of the Twitter population.

Just a few days before the speech, however, we see the impact of mainstream news brands, firstly from the Guardian and then the BBC (via the influential @BBCBreaking account). The BBC tweet increased cumulative reach by 15%.

The BBC were also the quickest to “break” the story to new Twitter users – faster than even Ed Miliband’s and David Cameron’s own accounts. As a result, by the time the politicians tweeted about it they were reaching very few people for the first time suggesting they were part of the reaction and not the news.

Major news organisations’ feeds were, relatively speaking, earlier to the party than the Oscars. While BBC Breaking News was the 3,411th account to tweet about the Academy Awards it was the 381st for the Miliband story. Its exposure impact was greater as it was easier for it to cut through the clutter.

Total reach for the Miliband story was markedly lower than the Oscars. While over 80% of the UK Twitter population was exposed to the Academy Awards, Ed Miliband’s EU speech reached under 60%. Both stories were focused around specific events and yet the Oscars reached its highest cumulative reach figure in quicker time and reached more people. Looking at the Twitter figures for both stories it becomes clear why. There were 11,559 accounts tweeting about the Oscars, markedly more than the 1,500 tweeting about the Miliband story.

Twitter’s strength lies also in its ability to combine news with first-hand accounts including celebrities and politicians. This allows a rapid flow of information at all stages of a story, allowing audiences that are interested to get a fuller picture of an event as it develops.

While the two stories we looked at are different in many ways, in one important respect the way they have played out in Twitter is similar. There was so much build-up that by the time the actual event happened most people had already been exposed to the story.

It is over 400 years since the first newspaper was published. While in these terms Twitter is young, its importance as a news source has grown at incredible speed. Audiences like the mix of fact and opinion, authenticity and interaction that it allows and it is now a firmly established and pivotal part of the news ecosystem.

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Shaun Austin is director of media research at YouGov

Additional research by Hayley Millard and Arthur Blair.

This is an edited version of an essay that originally appeared in the 2014 Reuters Institute Digital News Report.