How The Onion Surpassed 3 Million Twitter Followers

During the State of the Union address in January, the first Twitter search results for #SOU were not tweets from likely suspects such as CNN, The New York Times, Time or The Economist. Rather, they came from satirical news source The Onion.

The Onion’s prevalence over real news outlets on Twitter, even when it comes to real news, has become something of a norm. This week, The Onion welcomed its 3 millionth follower on Twitter. That’s about 300,000 more than Time, three times more than The Economist and 1.6 million more than Newsweek.

Granted, The Onion also boasts the largest print and web circulation out of the four publications, but there’s more at work on Twitter than sheer eyeballs. The attention that The Onion gets on Twitter is a testament to its success of continuing its satire of news organizations onto social media.

“The newspaper’s content is delivered constantly, tweeted at optimum times and posted on Facebook during high-traffic periods,” explains the site’s online media kit.

Project Manager Matt Kirsch says that when the publication first began tweeting in 2008, it used the platform mostly like an RSS feed. Since then, its strategy has grown to encompass many of the same tactics used by real news outlets.

The Onion live tweets events like the Oscars and the Super Bowl from its various accounts. Sometimes it queues up jokes in advance, but for unpredictable events like the Super Bowl it has writers contribute in real time.

It also uses the platform to report on developing stories, both made up or real. In May, when The Onion reported that a 500-foot-tall Osama bin Laden had emerged from the sea, for instance, the Twitter account kept the public updated with Twitpics and quotes from government officials exclusive to Twitter. The method is not unlike that of a legitimate news outlet’s Twitter stream during breaking news situations.

“I think we use similar strategies,” Kirsch says. “The Onion is perfect for Twitter because our headlines are so entertaining — we can create our own news and make it seem more exciting.”

Real outlets often post hyperbolic headlines on Twitter, but not without scrutiny. Sticking to the facts, which are rarely as clickable as a 500-foot-tall bin Laden, can be a disadvantage on a platform that rewards pithy one-liners. If you ask Kirsch, this difference doesn’t make a comparison between his and other news outlets’ Twitter success unfair.

“We put out the same kind of content,” he says.

The Onion‘s most recent Twitter-generated content certainly does fit in with that of major real news outlets. Just as broadcasters are increasingly using Twitter to highlight reactions to news, The Onion has started incorporating Tweets into its video newscast, The Onion Review.

“We really try to engage our users even though The Onion doesn’t really care about our users — that’s kind of our line,” Kirsch says.