ON THE FLY How news media are making friends in the world of social networking

Is the Express run by a bunch of Twitters?

The Sunday Express today ran a story questioning the value of using the licence fee for BBC staff to tweet. It is a valid point to question if the BBC should be investing time in tweeting if people are not following accounts. I would agree that Twitter is still not widely used by normal people - I cannot think of a single one of my friends not involved in politics, journalism or that media that regularly uses the site. However, the article is pretty embarrassing. It repeatedly refers to Twitter feeds as sites, and instead of quoting the amount of followers the BBC accounts have, they have used the figure for how many feeds the accounts follow. So while the article claims 5 Live's Victoria Derbyshire only has two followers, she actually has 3,641 followers but only follows 2 feeds herself. A pretty feeble error. Unsurprisingly the article does not mention the number of followers Derbyshire's 5 Live colleague Richard Bacon has, 1.3m.

UPDATE 18/01/2010: The article has been removed from the Daily Express website