A South-West daily has passed a milestone on micro-blogging website Twitter.

Plymouth-based daily The Herald can now boast 10,000 followers on Twitter since it launched its main account just over two years ago.

The Herald feeds tweets to its account automatically from its website thisisplymouth.co.uk and each tweet contains a link back to the site.

Herald web editor Neil Shaw said: “Social networking sites like Twitter are now a major source of traffic for our site, coming a close second as a referrer to search engines such as Google and some days even beating it.

“Not only that, they increase awareness of our brand, raise our profile, alter perception of what The Herald is and allow us to talk directly with our users, readers and visitors all day, every day.

“We realised back in 2008 that sites like Twitter would be key to what we do, so we were an early adopter, and it has paid off.

“Interaction with our readers is one of the keys to success and social networking makes that interaction possible.”

The paper says that the 10,000 follower count puts it in the top 1,000 accounts in the country.

The Herald also has more than 10,000 friends, fans and followers across other social networking sites including Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and Foursquare.