8 per cent Americans get their news on Twitter

Eight per cent of Americans use Twitter as a key source of news as opposed to 30 per cent of people who get their news on Facebook, according to a new survey.
Nearly one-in-ten US adults get news through Twitter, a report by the Pew Research Center said.
Compared with the 30 per cent of Americans who get news on Facebook, Twitter news consumers stand out as younger, more mobile and more educated.
Twitter posts were analysed for the information shared, sentiments expressed and ebb and flow of interest.
According to the survey, 16 per cent of US adults use Twitter. Among those, roughly half (52 per cent) "ever" get news there - with news defined as "information about events and issues that involve more than just your friends or family."

Mobile devices are a key point of access for these Twitter news consumers. The vast majority, 85 per cent, get news (of any kind) at least sometimes on mobile devices.

That outpaces Facebook news consumers by 20 percentage points; 64 per cent of Facebook news consumers use mobile devices for news. The same is true of 40 per cent of all US adults overall, according to the survey.
Twitter news consumers stand out for being younger and more educated than both the population overall and Facebook news consumers, researchers said.
Twitter news consumers also tend to be more educated than the general population and than Facebook news consumers.

A separate Pew Research analysis of conversations on Twitter around major news events reveals three common characteristics: much of what gets posted centres on passing along breaking news; sentiments shift considerably over time; and however passionate, the conversations do not necessarily track with public opinion.
This two-part report is based first on a survey of more than 5,000 US adults (including 736 Twitter users and 3,268 Facebook users) and, second, on an analysis of Twitter conversations surrounding major news events which spanned nearly three years.