Analysis

Maggie Haberman tweets a lot more than you

June 7, 2017 By Carlett Spike
Image via Pixabay

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When you start reading this story, Maggie Haberman will likely have just tweeted. By the time you finish, she’ll probably have tweeted again.

The New York Times political reporter is well-known for her Page One stories about the president and his inner circle. She’s also known for being prolific on Twitter. How prolific?

Haberman tweets a lot. Like, a lot a lot, to the tune of about 140 times a day. While Haberman declined to talk to us about her Twitter habits, we used Twitonomy to analyze her social-media activity from May 8 to 30. We chose May 8 as the start date because that was around the time (now former) FBI Director James Comey was fired, and a series of breaking news events occurred many of the afternoons that followed.

Over those 23 days, Haberman tweeted 3,199 times. To showcase just how insane this number is, we looked at how it compared to the same metric for some of her well-known colleagues who also cover politics for the Times: Glenn Thrush, Peter Baker, Jeremy Peters, and Mark Landler.

 

Clearly, Haberman takes first place—tweeting nine times more often than runner-up Thrush, who tweeted 344 times. Baker came in third with 290, Peters with 45, and Landler with a lowly 16 tweets during that time period.

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A day in the life of Maggie Haberman’s Twitter feed

How does Haberman do it? We dissected her tweets from a single day to glean some insight. We chose one at random: May 30*.

Most of her tweet activity comes in the form of retweets. On May 30, she pressed “retweet” 92 times, mostly on breaking news or stories from fellow reporters. She also posted 16 quote-tweets and 18 originals. Altogether, she racked up 126 tweets that day.

 

Over the course of 16 hours, Haberman retweeted stories on Mike Flynn’s private consulting firm, Ben Jacobs donating his broken glasses to the Newseum, and the firing of the police officer who shot Tamir Rice. Many of her original tweets followed similar themes, highlighting news from the day and often calling out the good work of other reporters.

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Haberman’s Twitter “day” started around 7:30 am, with a retweeted link to a Times story on the end of trans-Atlantic relations between the US and Germany. From that point, she continued to tweet consistently throughout the day.

At 9:13 am:

At 12:01 pm she retweeted @PageSix:

At 3:12 pm:

At 6:20 pm she retweeted @politico:

At 9:23 pm:

Finally, a nightcap at 11:50 pm, retweeting @morningmoneyben:

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Maggie Haberman wields Twitter power

All that tweeting pays off. As of this writing, Haberman has 485,323 followers, and she follows 3,212 accounts. Her potential reach—or the follower count of the users who mentioned her on a particular day (we looked at June 1)—was 47,655,643. Since joining Twitter in 2009, she has tweeted more than 143,000 times and has been added to over 8,000 lists.

A few more points of interest:

  • Haberman follows Donald Trump and a number of his advisors and family members, but she does not follow Jared Kushner or Melania Trump.
  • While we cannot definitively say how many or what percentage of accounts she follows are from conservative outlets and their reporters, we did analyze numbers from four outlets. Haberman follows 41 accounts affiliated with FOX, four affiliated with Breitbart, 20 affiliated with The New York Post, and 11 affiliated with National Review.
  • Haberman obviously engages with other reporters on Twitter. Below are lists of the users she retweeted, replied to, and mentioned most from May 8-30:

 

 

 

  • Haberman’s most-retweeted tweet from May 8-30 was a quote-tweet in response to a mocking comment by YourVoice™ host Bill Mitchell, who suggested people should flood The Times and The Post with fake tips. This jab was retweeted more than 15,000 times:

 

*Timeline of tweets based on EST timezone

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Carlett Spike is a freelance writer and former CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow her on Twitter @CarlettSpike.