Twitter vs Facebook News Audiences - Which is the high value one?

There is some interesting detail in the latest Pew Research on the impact of Social Media on News - firstly, its only 9% of all people who get news this way - El Reg:

News websites are still the place most people visit to get their daily digest of current affairs. The PRC described Facebook and Twitter as being "pathways to news" but added that their role had been somewhat over-hyped. "The population that uses these networks for news at all is still relatively small, especially the part that does so very often," researchers said.

"Moreover, these social media news consumers have not given up other methods of getting news, such [as] going directly to websites, using apps or through search. In other words, social media are additional paths to news, not replacements for more traditional ones."

The study shows 9 per cent of people clicked on news links recommended by social networks "very often", compared with 36 per cent who go directly to a news website for stories, 32 per cent of current affairs fans, while 29 per cent of Americans used an aggregator or app to access the same information.

More interesting to me, the same survey noted that Twitter and Facebook were perceived differently by their respective users.

"Facebook news users get more news from friends and family and see it as news they might well have gotten someplace else if Facebook did not exist," the PRC said. "For Twitter users, though, the news links come from a more even mix of family and friends and news organisations. Most of these users also feel that without Twitter, they would have missed this kind of news."

The stats show that 70% of Facebook users get news from friend and family, 13% from News organisations, 10% from "Other". This is 36%, 27% and 18% for Twitter.

Facebook has the larger user base - the populations do overlap, with Facebook as the leading platform. 82% of those who ever get some news via Twitter recommendations also get some news via Facebook recommendations, and 40% so do very often or somewhat often. Facebook users are much less likely to be on Twitter than the other way around. Just 27% of Facebook news followers also get news via Twitter, with 11% doing so somewhat or very often. Over all, 13% of digital news consumers follow news recommendations on both Facebook and Twitter – but fewer than 4% do so very or somewhat often.

Twitter users believe they get news that they otherwise wouldn't have:

On Twitter, with its somewhat broader mix of sources for news links, there was more sense that the news they encountered this way expanded knowledge or source list. Twitter users were nearly split between the sense that they would get this news elsewhere (43%) and that they would not (39%).

Also, men and women use services different.

Men and women responded very differently. Women were more likely to see the news as not special to Twitter (53% versus 30% who said they wouldn’t get it elsewhere). Men were more likely to see it as giving them a unique or broader sense of the news (46% versus 35% who said they would get the news elsewhere).

There is quite an interesting split of device usage too (see picture at top):

Looking at the heaviest users – the relatively small number of people who rely on social media recommendations for news very often the percentages are similar across devices. Of those who get news on desktop/laptop computers, 6% get news via Facebook recommendations. The same is true for 7% of smartphone news users and 8% of tablet news consumers. For Twitter, the numbers are smaller but follow a similar pattern: 2% of desktop/laptop users follow Twitter recommendations very often on the desktop/laptop, 3% for smartphone news consumers on smartphones and 3% for tablet news consumers on that device.

As you'd expect, Twitter, being more lightweight, is more the go-to service on the small screen

Twitter news followers tend to be more heavily mobile than the public at large, and they lean toward smartphones in particular. Fully three-quarters, 76%, of Twitter new followers own a smartphone. That compares with 67% of Facebook news followers and 60% of digital news consumers over all. Twitter users are also more likely to get news on their smartphone, 64% versus 47% for Facebook users and 30% for all mobile news consumers.

Also, Twitter news followers are more likely to be male, 57% versus 44% of Facebook users and 48% of the population over all. They are also younger; 39% are 18 to 29 years old, which is nearly double the population over all (22%), but about the same as Facebook users (37%). Not only that, they are highly educated. More than a third (37%) have a college degree or beyond, higher than the 28% for all adults, and fewer have no more than a high school diploma (34% versus 44% over all). They are less white than the population over all and less white than Facebook news users.

There are some emerging implications to this - the Facebook audience is probably more mass market (ie lower value), the Twitter audience would appear top be more akin to the higher value audiences that the FT, Economist et al go for. There is a lesson in that, perhaps?

And, as AllThingsD point out, this will grow and grow:

Wait a minute: Aren’t the Pew people the same ones who told us, a year ago, that Facebook was an increasingly important source of traffic for news sites? Yup. (Good memory!) But these two reports aren’t mutually exclusive. Last year’s survey pointed out that social media is a lot more important to news sites than it used to be. This one just reminds us that, for most sites, other stuff still matters more.

'Till next year then.....