Contrary to popular belief, Facebook and Twitter may not be as important for news sharing, at least at present. A new surgery of 3,000 people by the Pew Research Center found that only 9% get their news ‘very often’ from people they follow on Facebook and Twitter. 36% use search engines to find news while 29% use news collecting websites.
Within Facebook, Pew found that 70% of people turn to family and friends for news, opposed to only 36% of those on Twitter. People on Twitter follow more journalists and news publications to get their news. If you were to look at Facebook’s more shared stories of 2011, it’s quite evident that the sort of stories shared are more viral in nature. Given the fact that Facebook and Twitter are a mix of non-news links, pictures and brand pages, they are more ‘pathways to news’, as put by PRC, rather than news collectors have others have predicted.
