Here are snapshots of how some of the Asian news sites, leading news providers in their own countries, are doing on Twitter and Facebook.
I visited each of their Twitter home pages and Facebook fan pages to prepare the charts. There are four columns for each news site, though only the second and the fourth are prominent, on the Twitter chart. The first figure — 0 in the case of Channel NewsAsia — represents the number of Twitter users it follows. The second figure shows the number of followers it has. The third figure — 123 in the case of Channel NewsAsia — shows how many times it has been listed by other Twitter users. And the fourth and last figure denotes the number of tweets it has sent out.
The Facebook chart just shows the number of fans of each site.
The New York Times has 484,960 fans on Facebook.
And on Twitter the New York Times follows 189, has 2,157,850 followers and has been listed 14,266 times.
Facebook — now with more than 350 million users worldwide — "is becoming part of the infrastructure of the Web, every bit as indispensible to our daily wanderings as Google or e-mail", wrote Farhad Manjoo on Slate last week. And so, I think, is Twitter.
That's why I wanted to find out how the Asian news sites are doing on the two social networks.
For the news sites, it looks like the more they tweet, the more followers they have. But the conversion rate from tweets to followers varies wildly.
The Straits Times in Singapore, for example, seems to have almost as many followers as the number of tweets it has sent out. Singapore's Channel NewsAsia, on the other hand, has tweeted many more times than it has followers.
But Channel NewsAsia has far more fans on Facebook than the Straits Times. The Times of India and the Hindustan Times, another Indian site, also have more Facebook fans than Twitter followers. The Times of India does not even promote its Facebook fan page on its website and yet has more than 2,000 fans.
PS: For Bangkok Post, I used only its Breaking News home page on Twitter. It has other Twitter pages. Here are the Twitter pages for the others:
Channel NewsAsia, The Straits Times, The New Straits Times of Malaysia, The Times of India and the Hindustan Times.
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