Twitter Scorecard for Publishers

Mike Hendrickson
May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Recently Publisher's Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question "So who is twittering, and how effectively?" I believe that if you are asking how effectively we are using Twitter, there is considerable more data needed than was presented. In my opinion, the number of Followers is not a complete measure of effectiveness. In fairness, PW did not say they were attempting to be comprehensive or complete in their scorecard, so I thought I would provide the data that is available mixed with some of my own obtained by scraping. So, I'll attempt to fill-in the scorecard a bit more.

First a note on who is behind the publisher accounts. O'Reilly as a company has oodles of Tweeters who blog about work, life, interests, etc., including @timoreilly who is nearing the half-million followers threshold. I suspect other publishers have the same army of tweeters too, but the data below is is just for the publisher account only. Oftentimes, these sort of accounts are run by PR groups in a Publishing company.

Below, you will find the same list of publishers contained in the original article with the addition of the following column headers and data:

Pub_Twitter is the Publisher account on Twitter. This list was created by PW and am not sure what the criteria was. Followers is the number of people that are following the publisher. These numbers are already off as many of these publishers have added many new followers since the original writing. I kept the same number that PW reported. Following is how many users the publisher follows. Updates is how many tweets the publisher has posted since the account was created. Content is the most popular words the publisher uses in their tweets. Url is a link to a wordle that visualizes the corpus of tweets for the publisher. At the bottom of the table, you will see All Publishers which shows averages and the link includes all words in a visual wordle.

Pub_Twitter	Followers	Following	Updates	Content	URL
@AAKnopf	1,581	390	495	Book, New, Read, RT	http://twitpic.com/5k982
@AtriaBooks	1,809	1,813	257	Book, ChetTheDog , Dog, New	http://twitpic.com/5k97i
@BantamDell	1,987	1,125	244	Blood, Page, Free, Literary	http://twitpic.com/5k95r
@ChelseaGreen	5,003	5,296	4185	Green, RT, Thanks, Book	http://twitpic.com/5k93w
@DCComics	2,176	0	0	---
@DoubleDayPub	1,057	622	137	Lost, RT, Pygmy, New	http://twitpic.com/5k908
@FreePressBooks	516	387	16	Book, Check, Mason, tinyurl	http://twitpic.com/5k8yu
@GrandCentralPub	3,726	3,004	671	Thanks, RT, Book, UR	http://twitpic.com/5k8xd
@GroveAtlantic	268	59	297	Wetlands, Hely , Books, tinyurl	http://twitpic.com/5k8uc
@HarlequinBooks	2,187	159	776	Harlequin, Romance, Author, Free	http://twitpic.com/5k8qn
@HarperPerennial	805	459	149	RT, Book, Story, Read	http://twitpic.com/5k8oq
@LittleBrown	5,999	6,238	1359	RT, Author, Scarecrow, Book	http://twitpic.com/5k8mj
@OReillyMedia	7,340	3,640	2073	O'Reilly, RT, New, Book	http://twitpic.com/5k8l2
@ThomasNelson	678	834	182	Announced, List, Best, Times	http://twitpic.com/5k8g8
@TinHouseBooks	892	162	58	Forgot, New, Tin, Books	http://twitpic.com/5k8c7
@TorBooks	3,995	2,056	1525	Post, Tor, Blog , New	http://twitpic.com/5k89z
@VintageAnchor	1,643	1,278	237	RT, Tonight, Book, New	http://twitpic.com/5k86u
@VintageBooks	783	448	348	Vintage, Book, Read, Books	http://twitpic.com/5k84j
@WorkmanPub	1,485	562	174	RT, Book, Great, Books	http://twitpic.com/5k80s
All Publishers(avg)	2,312	1,502	694		http://twitpic.com/5k9p4

I am thinking of making this a quarterly scorecard for 2009. Before I do that, are there meaningful and obtainable measures you would like to see added to the scorecard? What are the real measures: Sales increases? Information disseminated more efficiently and targeted? Increasing the feeling of community? What elements do you think should be measured in a Twitter Scorecard? Finally, if you are a publisher using Twitter and want to be included in future scorecards, let me know. I am mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com or @mikehatora on Twitter.

Categories:

12 Comments

Joanna K said:
May 21, 2009 2:37 PM

Hi Mike,

This is an interesting topic; I'm now tweeting on behalf of Annick Press (@AnnickPress) and am following a number of publishers as well. Please add me to your scorecard!

I use Twitter to: provide information/links that my followers will like enough to retweet, contribute to discussions about books (especially children's books) and publishing in general, and get the word out about our events, reviews, new books, contests/giveaways, and blog posts.

I'm looking forward to meeting lots of fellow Twitterers in person at the BEA tweetup, too!

Sincerely,
Joanna K

Steve Weber said:
May 21, 2009 8:57 PM

As they say, it's quality, not quantity.

On the other hand, there's power in numbers.

SpikeTheLobster said:
May 22, 2009 4:47 AM

I think it'd be impossible to gauge quality. For example, I arrived at this post via Steve Weber (imagine me pointing to previous poster...), which shows that - for me - that particular Tweet of his had value.

You'd have to know what each individual company hopes to achieve (in measurable terms, not just vagueries like "connecting with our readership") to measure whether it's successful.

Personally, I think it'd be useful mostly as a reference resource for writers and readers. Sort of a one-stop shop for publishers on Twitter. ;)

Daniel Steinberg said:
May 22, 2009 9:53 AM

Over at Prag Progs, Dave (@pragdave) and Andy (@pragmaticandy) both tweet and we have @praglife for our new Pragmatic Life series.

In addition, O'Reilly is our distributor for both our traditional Pragmatic Bookshelf titles and for our Pragmatic Life titles so we are interested in seeing the effects of Tim tweeting about our new titles to his half a million followers.

Zenneia McLendon said:
May 26, 2009 4:56 PM

The National Academies Press is on twitter too! (@NAPress) This data is impressive and helps publishers put social media sites like twitter in perspective.

Guinevere de la Mare said:
May 27, 2009 12:24 PM

I'm the community manager at Chronicle Books and the voice behind our Twitter account (@ChronicleBooks).

I'd also be curious to hear what PW's criteria were. We've got 6,012 followers, 5,909 following, and 692 updates. Seems like we should have scored pretty well on this list!

bowerbird said:
May 28, 2009 2:52 PM

perhaps some perspective is in order?

cory doctorow has 20,000 followers.
tim o'reilly has almost half a million.

and, just in case you're wondering,
aplusk is approaching two million...

-bowerbird

Molly said:
May 29, 2009 12:07 AM

I'm an children's/YA editor at a major publishing house who tweets (@molly_oneill), as do a growing number of my editorial and agent colleagues. Twitter has become an invaluable tool for me. However, I think those of us tweeting individually, as professionals inside a house, are using Twitter in an entirely different way than those running the "official" accounts.

Daniel Davis said:
June 2, 2009 6:09 PM

I'm a small, independent publisher (Steam Crow Press) who finds Twittering to be a great communication tool.

@steamcrow

We have just under 800 followers.

- Steamcrow

Mary Hall said:
June 2, 2009 8:15 PM

Very cool to see. I'm glad to see the publishers using Web 2.0 It's a perfect marriage of print and technology.

H Lindsay said:
June 17, 2009 7:23 AM

Hello from South Africa

Is anyone looking into magazine publishers and Twitter usage - specifically custom publishers?

Mike said:
August 28, 2009 12:19 PM

@ H Lindsay
Hi, can you tell me more about the offer?

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