The Huffington Post’s main Twitter page, @HuffingtonPost, which has over four million followers and more than 300,000 tweets, most prominently features one-line teasers that link to Huffington Post stories on the web. Many of these tweets are clearly written in an effort to grab a reader’s attention just enough to want to click on the link and read more. For example, many, like the one below, promise to reveal something interesting, like advice from Oprah.
The page is very active, with 19 posts during one 90-minute period on a Monday afternoon. The vast majority of the posts are just plain text tweets with links, however there is also the occasional picture attached as well, most often seen in posts that lead to stories on food.
While a steady stream of news headlines may be interesting to some, one way the Huffington Post could improve their Twitter presence would be more interaction with followers and others on Twitter. They rarely Retweet (unless it’s something one of the HuffPost’s other accounts has tweeted) and never seem to interact through replies at all.
In addition to the main Huffington Post twitter, there are also a number of additional accounts maintained by the organization, including @HuffPostLA which features prominent stories from L.A., @goodnews, which shares the most inspiring or positive Huffington Posts stories of the day, and @ElHuffPost, which functions similarly to the main HuffPost account put posts tweets in Spanish.
There are also other regions, such as Canada, and cities, such as San Francisco and Denver, that have more locally centric Huffington Post twitter pages. Additionally, the majority of the sub-sections of the site, including Politics, Comedy, Women and Sports, just to name a few, have their own Twitter pages to share content. These pages feature more retweets and more interaction than the main account. For example, the @HuffPostSports account retweeted a number of tweets from the official Boston Marathon Twitter account throughout the day of the race.
The Huffington Post is also on Facebook, and the main page has more than 2.5 million likes. The majority of the stories shared on Facebook are the same as the ones shared on Twitter, though some (like this Oscar Meyer story) at least featured different headlines on Facebook.
Many of the headlines and lead-ins posted on Facebook; just as they do on Twitter, attempt to grab the reader’s attention with rhetorical questions or cliffhangers. It appears that the Facebook page is not used quite as often as the Twitter page, though the page is still plenty active with numerous posts each day.
It appears that many of the additional accounts (sub-sections, countries, cities) that existed on Twitter also have separate pages on Facebook as well.
The Huffington Post also has a significant presence on Instagram. Visually driven pages like HuffPostStyle and HuffPostTravel have a fairly large Instagram following. Interestingly, while I expected the images caption’s to link to pages posted online on the Huffington Post site, the majority of the images posted on the HuffPostStyle did not. Instead, there were re-posts from celebrities and pictures from inside the HuffPost offices.
Kelsey Knoche 