A new Pew study about Twitter use wasn’t surprising to me, an avid Twitter user. Certainly my experience as a college journalism professor bears out the findings that Twitter users are young, mobile and educated. The research showed 8 percent of people on Twitter get their news there. What did surprise me was the statistic that 30 percent of adults surveyed get their news on Facebook.
Graphic from the Pew Center report on Twitter
That’s not my experience. I am on Facebook often, and I follow several news sites, but I wouldn’t say I go there to get news other than about my friends and family. For me, the more ever-present Twitter feed serves as my early warning device, to let me know when something is happening. I follow a lot of journalists and news sites, local, national and international. After my Twitter warning signal, I likely then turn to a national or local news source to get more information.
The Twitter numbers for young people definitely skew because of their reliance on cellphones and smartphones. Most of my students have smartphones and the phones are seldom more than an arm’s-length away. The findings point even more to a digital first strategy and making content available for mobile in an easily digestible way.
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