One of the popular social networking sites in the world today is Twitter. Its unique 140 character posts have captured the interest of hundreds of millions of users all over the world. It is convenient and it's the most popular platform for advertisers, companies and celebrities to reach out millions of followers in just one app and it's nothing new that it has been go-to for updated news and popular topics to be distributed and tweeted fresh and live on the web.
Survey shows that 9 out of 10 Twitter users or 86% use the app for news and 74% of that does daily. On a most detailed account, on the survey of 3,713 twitter users and 1000 on non-user which 469 were not on twitter, 94 percent get their news on twitter and from this, 34 percent used the trending topics and 30 percent use search. On the non-user poll, more than half have seen tweets, 45 percent on TV, 33 percent from friends, 27 percent from news articles they read, 22 percent from twitter without signing up, 12 percent from search and percent in a newspaper.
They also observed the difference in behavior in of the Twitter users in the news feed. They follow a lot of companies and celebrities and popular figures. A big part of twitter users, as much as ¾ follow news related figure such as anchors, journalists and commentators. For the one that are not that active, this would be something to pass the time but when it comes to news articles.
According to the American Press Institute, almost all the twitter users are also consumers of other forms of social media. The researchers say, that "people using social media as a news source can design their own news agenda identifying the sources and topics they want to follow." The researchers added that this has led to speculation that people will become narrow in their interests without the agenda-setting influence of news organizations.
