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BREAKING: These are the kinds of news tweets that perform best

Audience & Social – Nieman Lab · Laura Hazard Owen · last updated

For news publishers, links are life. But, as I reported last week, publishers appear to face a penalty when they link to their stories on X. I used Claude to scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 different publishers, then charted their median engagements (likes + comments + RT’s).

Posts with links definitely do worse. The New York Times, which includes links in 88% of its tweets, has 53 million followers and a median of 383 engagements (likes + comments + RT’s) per tweet — an engagement rate of 0% when you calculate average engagements per follower. CNN‘s engagement rate? Also 0%. Engagement-maxing accounts like @GlobeEyeNews and @LeadingReport, which don’t include links in tweets, perform much better, with engagement rates of 0.95% and 0.45%, respectively.

But links aren’t the only thing that make or break a tweet. I used Claude to analyze the text of all the tweets in my sample and point out possible patterns. Here are a couple things that make a news tweet perform well on X.

Breaking! Across the board, tweets that begin with “Breaking” or “Breaking News:” have higher engagement. New York Times tweets that began with “Breaking News:” had an average 3,232 engagements, four times the average. A similar pattern held for tweets from the AP, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. (CNN rarely uses “Breaking” in tweets.)

Globe Eye News and Leading Report begin just about every tweet with “BREAKING.”

Trump quotes: Fox News’s most-engaged tweets were direct quotes from Trump, no editorializing added. Its most engaged-with tweet in my sample was his Easter message.

~Vagueness~: Globe Eye News tweets that did not include sourcing information got nearly twice the engagement of tweets that did include a source. In other words, unattributed claims do better. Here are Globe Eye News’s most-engaged tweets in my sample:

Meanwhile, Globe Eye News tweets that included an “according to” — whether it was “according to” X news outlet or “according to” an investigation — were among its poorest performers.

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