Latter-Day Tweets: The Mormon Times's Use of Twitter as a Reporting Tool

Abstract

This study examined Twitter use by the Mormon Times, a weekly publication operated by the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah. Specifically, 415 tweets posted during a six-month period were analyzed. The Mormon Times staff posted an average of 2.25 tweets a day and most often used these tweets to promote content from its columnists. Most of these tweets promoted content generated by Mormon Times staff and included links that took followers back to mormontimes.com. However, the interaction between followers and the Mormon Times staff was limited, with just 12% of the tweets used to reply to followers. Only 4% of tweets were retweets, and 8% of tweets solicited feedback from users. This limited interaction followed similar trends established by mainstream newspapers in their use of Twitter. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.