“As social networking sites recognize and adapt to their role in the news environment, each will offer unique features”, said Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s Director of Journalism Research.
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Twitter users were twice as likely to use the social media platform for breaking news compared to Facebook users, according to the study.
The study is based on a survey of more than 2,000 US adults, including 331 Twitter users and 1,315 Facebook users – a proportion which Pew notes is representative of uptake of each service. But, since the portion of users who get news on the social networks has grown, more Americans overall are getting news through each site: 1-in-10 USA adults get news on Twitter, and about 4-in-10 (41%) get news on Facebook.
Though more people are getting their news from the social sites, most Americans still see Facebook and Twitter as secondary news sources, the study found. Sixty percent of both Twitter and Facebook users said that the sites were “not a very important way” they get their news. Almost six-in-ten Twitter news users (59%) use the site to keep up with a news event as it is happening, which is nearly double the rate among Facebook news users (31%). And even Twitter, which doesn’t have enough users to please Wall Street, manages to provide news for 10 percent of the country.
“Facebook also recently launched a program to natively host publishers” content – called Facebook Instant Articles – with the aim of reducing article load times in the hopes of keeping users sticking around on its platform for longer.
Among women, Facebook users are more likely to regularly see posts about health, entertainment, and people and events in their communities, Pew found, while Twitter users are more likely to read posts about weather, entertainment, crime and health.
The growth in social media news consumption is consistent across all demographics, regardless of gender, age, race, education level, or household income. About a third (32%) of Facebook users post about politics and government, compared with a quarter (25%) of Twitter users.
Twitter is also working on figuring out how to give its users a better grip on breaking events.
The finding that users are more likely to engage in political discourse on Facebook corresponds a report Pew released last month that showed that 61 percent of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 get their political news from Facebook in a given week.
On Twitter, only 13% of users reply to such tweets and 17% “favorite” them.
While politics reign supreme on Facebook, Twitter users are more likely to directly follow news organizations or reporters. The same is true, though to a lesser extent, when it comes to following political parties or candidates (30% of Twitter users, 23% of Facebook users). That share has increased substantially from 2013…
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Use of Twitter for news, for example, grew between 2013 and 2015 among users under 35 (from 55% to 67%) and those 35 and older (47% to 59%). While on Facebook, news use grew among both men (44% to 61%) and women (49% to 65%) over the two years.
