Spain is among the top countries in the world in terms of monthly user traffic on media websites at reference letter, only surpassed in Europe by the United Kingdom, and in America by the United States and Brazil, according to a report of the average, Reputation and Intangibles Center of the University of Navarra. In the digital territory, the report shows that traffic also reaches media websites through social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter (42.1%).

The study analyzes the activity and impact on Twitter of 73 Spanish media, and compares the leading media in Spain with those in Europe (Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium) and America (USA, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Chile). In this regard, the focus is placed in a special way on the content of some 145,000 tweets published by 4 headers of reference letter in Spain (El País, El Mundo, eldiario.es and El Confidencial) around the topics that were news in 2018 (1100 different issues). The topics analyzed include the impact of the Catalan issue in both the national and Catalan press, in addition to the conversation around the main political parties and corruption cases.

The professor of the School of Economics and director of the average Reputation and Intangibles Center at the University of Navarra, Francesc Pujol, highlighted the role of Twitter as the main channel for dissemination of the Catalan crisis in 2017 and 2018. As a result of the October 2017 referendum and the subsequent news about the Catalan crisis and the application of article 155 of the Constitution by the Spanish government, national media multiplied by three the retweets around this issue, while Catalan media in Spanish multiplied them by seven, and the press in Catalan skyrocketed its retweets, multiplying by 17.

Pujol took advantage of the impact of this issue to underline the importance of the mission statement of the media on Twitter. "The press has to be on Twitter because it has to explain what is happening; if the press does not do it, others will. That is where the battle of information and disinformation is fought," he said.

The report concludes with a ranking of relevance on Twitter, where the accounts most followed by the most influential journalists are mentioned. In this regard, the professor explained that the most influential journalists -those who generate the most engagement with their tweets- are not necessarily those with the largest number of followers issue . Among Pujol's recommendations for the media to generate branding in networks such as Twitter is to take advantage of the prestige of their journalists, giving them visibility through their own media accounts. "This is hardly done in Spain," he said.