The Saniti ranking of South Africa’s most influential newspapers on Twitter has generated many questions. This page tries to answer some of these. If your question is not answered here please email me and I’ll try and help. For monthly Saniti reports look here.

What does Saniti stand for?

The South African News Influence on Twitter Index. This was changed in August 2011 from South African Newspaper Influence on Twitter Index to reflect the growing number of non-print news organisations on the list.

How do you select these publications?

Many people have asked, why this and why not that? The initial motivation for producing this index was to measure how some of South Africa’s longest-running news organisations were adapting to the changing publishing world. Most of those were exclusively print. This has now evolved to include publishers that are primarily digital. Nevertheless, all the publications listed here primarily general news organisations (as opposed to specialist, trade or community publications).

Why Klout?

Measuring online influence is an imperfect science. Klout is simply one one way to try and achieve this. Klout goes well beyond simply counting followers in its index and takes into account metrics such as how many times an account is re-tweeted, how many times it is listed or the degree of conversation it generates. So while some might have very large numbers of followers this doesn’t automatically imply a high Klout score.

Your numbers are wrong

Twitter accounts (and Klout scores) are a moving target. Each published Saniti report is as correct as possible at the time it is released but followers come and go. In most cases the changes are negligible. If you think I’ve made a serious mistake then please email me and I will look into it.

You’ve left off …

If you think a publication deserves to be on the next Saniti report please email me. It won’t guarantee it will be included but I promise to give it fair consideration.

What if our publication has multiple Twitter accounts?

It’s true. Many local publications have more than one Twitter account. For now it’s not practical to collate all of these into a single rating but it is something I am considering.