A new report by Commute London has revealed that a total of 280,000 delay sentiment tweets directed at rail providers were sent by UK commuters last year.

The report showed that the total tweets about the service directed at 14 operators reached more than 1.77 million.

Rail operator First Great Western received the most number of tweets with 265,201 tweets, followed by Virgin Trains and Greater Anglia with 257,254 and 241,038 respectively.

Commute London director Darren Wood said: "Social media sites like Twitter provide commuters with an open forum to make complaints, provide feedback and make themselves heard by others.

"Our analysis shows that the train companies need to make much better use of their Twitter feeds if they wish to keep customers happy by listening and learning from criticism."

"Our analysis shows that the train companies need to make much better use of their Twitter feeds if they wish to keep customers happy by listening and learning from criticism."

Within delay sentiment tweets, First Great Western received 45,100 tweets, while Greater Anglia and Southern Rail respectively received 41,120 and 34,645 tweets.

According to the report, there were 70,969 tweets directed using cancellation language, including words such as cancel, replacement and bus replacement.

In addition, a total of 62,352 tweets handled overcrowding language such as crowd, sardine and no seat.

Recently, a new survey by consumer association Which? revealed that train operator Southern had topped the list of firms that offered the most delayed rail services to their passengers in the UK in 2014.

The report stated that C2C was the least delayed service, with approximately 14% passengers reporting a delay on their last journey.