Top news sites gets more traffic through Facebook compared to Twitter, based on the recent study conducted by Pew Research Center who released the result on Monday.
Its no surprise that Google still take the lead in referral traffic for news sites. Approximately, almost 30% of clicks for news and product searches came from this company. However, for a social network like Facebook to drive traffics in a noteworthy percentage from its audience is pretty good.
Nielsen’s data was used for the said study, wherein 25 top news sites were included.
Twitter was known for being the way of breaking a lot of news for it is designed as a micro-blogging platform. But, the fact that it is known to be the prime source for people with nose to news, it was not able to do the same when it comes to raising the referred traffics for news sites.
In Twitter, Los Angeles Times, based on the study got the highest percentage of traffic and it recorded a 3.5% shared of its traffic.
Various factors are to be considered why Facebook was able to hit more traffics for top news sites than what Twitter got. And the prime consideration is that by looking to its members, Facebook had more than 500 million users, unlike Twitter who had almost 200 million members but many are identified as inactive.
Apart from Google and Facebook who are contributing and serving as gateways for more referral traffics for popular news sites, Drudge Report – an aggregate and veteran site for news is said to place second or third on the ranking on the referral to more than half of the top news sites included in the study.
Results show that it (the Drudge Report) contributed to more than 30% of the traffic of The Daily Mail – a British Newspaper, then for Washington Post, it had shared 15% and 11% to the Boston Globe.