The Kyiv Post passed the 100,000-follower mark on Twitter on Sept. 11, with social media users from all around the world opting to see the newspaper’s content on their timelines.
Despite Ukraine having faded from international attention since the September 2014 Minsk peace agreements were signed, the Kyiv Post has steadily increased follower numbers, and is now gaining them at a rate of between 2,000 to 4,000 a month.
Chief Editor Brian Bonner said he was proud that the newspaper, which has a weekly print run of 9,500 copies, had built up such a large audience on the internet.
“We have more than 100,000 Twitter followers for our news coverage, which is more than many larger news organizations in larger cities, and more than many newspapers in the West with much larger circulations than we have.”
On Twitter, the Kyiv Post has overtaken the much larger Moscow Times, another leading regional English-language newspaper, with the Russian newspaper having 98,000 followers as of Sept 15.
“The credit goes to many people — our readers around the world, first and foremost,” Bonner said. “There have also been many events, from revolution to war, that prompted people to follow us. On the staff, the greatest rate of growth occurred when Christopher Miller, now at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was on our staff at the height of the revolution and the start of Russia’s war in 2014. Since then, our social media managers Euan MacDonald and Iryna Savchuk have promoted the staff coverage that has prompted such a large following.
Before the EuroMaidan Revolution in the winter of 2013-2014, the Kyiv Post had a much more modest following on Twitter – 4,908 followers on Oct. 11, 2013.
Follower numbers exploded as Ukraine descended into political crisis, with massive street protests against the government, and bloody clashes between protesters and riot police. By Sept. 17, 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russian-instigated conflict in the Donbas, follower numbers had risen to 52,500. A year later, in September 2015, as fighting in the east of Ukraine eased down, the number had risen to 64,800.
Bonner reckons the large growth in the Kyiv Post’s Twitter follower numbers since then may be down to greater use of the social medium, although growth in Twitter user numbers flattened out in the first quarter of 2015, at 302 million monthly active users. As of the second quarter of 2016 some 313 million people were daily users of Twitter.
