Social media is a lot more than simple message, image and status sharing, a new study from Pew Research suggests.
In said study, the institution discovered that 62% of Americans use social media to read news, and more incredibly, 66% of those users use Facebook to do just that.
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According to the report, “Pew Research Center analyzed the scope and characteristics of social media news consumers across nine social networking sites.” The results were conducted with 4654 “members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.” The results make for interesting reading too.
Among the nine networks studied, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter were the most popular platforms for news for American users. Their percentages ranged from 70% in the case of Reddit, to 59% for Twitter.
Interestingly still, is Tumblr ranking fourth ahead of Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat and lastly, Vine.
Pew suggests that these numbers could be reflective of the usage numbers of each network in the United States.
“Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population,” the report notes.
There’s another clear growth figure across all networks though: more Americans are using social media to obtain news in 2016 than in 2013.
Have a look at the full report here.
