Matt Cooper, the presenter of Today FM’s Last Word (and former PRII Annual Conference host), has retained his position as the most influential Irish journalist on Twitter according to the latest #murraytweetindex, published last week. TV3’s political correspondent Gavan Reilly took second place, with Sunday World sports journalist Kevin Palmer in third.
Sky News’ Ireland correspondent Darren McCaffrey topped the news category. Independent News & Media’s Group Business Editor Dearbhail McDonald stayed top in business, whilst Gavan Reilly topped the political category for the fourth consecutive year.
In its fourth year of publication, the #murraytweetindex, compiled by communications consultancy Murray (@MurrayIRL), is based on the analysis of the Twitter handles of over 720 journalists carried out in November and December 2017. Using the analysis tool Twitonomy, they gathered data for each of the journalists in terms of Total Number of Followers; Total Number of Retweets; % Retweeted; Total Number of Favourites; % of Favourited; and Tweets per day.
A composite index ranked the top 20 journalists overall. The life time total number of tweets these journalists have generated on the platform is over 2.7m.
In other major categories, David McWilliams retained the top columnist slot, Adrian Weckler stayed top for technology, and the Sun’s Ken Sweeney retained his number one position in the entertainment category as did Irish Daily Star’s Mick O’Toole in crime.
Results by outlet showed The Irish Times, at 18, with the most journalists in the top 100, followed by RTE with 15, Independent News & Media with 14 (17 including the Irish Daily Star and Sunday World), the Sunday Business Post with 9, Newstalk with 5, the Sunday Times/The Times with 4 and the Irish Examiner and TV3 with 3.
Compared to last year, Carl Kinsella from Joe.ie climbed the most up the ranking, gaining 198 positions to 77th place. He is also one of the ten journalists reporting for online only publications who are in the top 100. Others who climbed up the ranking included sports journalist Miguel Delaney (up 136 places to 27th), Kildare FM presenter Shane Beatty (up 126 places to 80th) and Irish Times columnist Jennifer O’Connell (up 115 places to 16th).
In addition to the overall results and news category winners, the research looked at how journalists performed in each of the parameters by which they were measured. David McWilliams retained the position of having the most followers on Twitter, adding over 35,000 since last year. Sports journalist Miguel Delaney remains the most prolific Tweeter with an average of 59 tweets per day, closely followed in 2nd and 3rd position by Ewan McKenna (52 tweets per day) and Newstalk presenter Dr Ciara Kelly (49 tweets per day).
The top 100 #murraytweetindex performers are displayed on an interactive website designed by Murray Creative: www.murraytweetindex.ie
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