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All The News That's Fit To Tweet: The Top Social Networks For News, Ranked

We've known since at least 2018 that news consumption by Americans has taken a turn; at the time, the Pew Research Center revealed that social media provided more news to people than print journalism (a trend that’s only made things worse for print news(Opens in a new window)).

Pew's newest survey on the topic, from July 2022, shows that the number of people absorbing news from social media in some way remains the same (91%, give or take). And for people who regularly use Facebook (70% of US adults), 31% also regularly use it to get the news.

That’s a slightly higher percentage than the runner-up, YouTube. It has more regular users at 82% but fewer people using it for news. Twitter stands out: Just 27% of respondents use the platform regularly, but 14% use it for news, giving it third place for news consumption. Instagram and TikTok are in 4th and 5th place, while other services drift into single digits for news reading.

A new platform included in the research this year is Nextdoor, the hyper-local social network for neighborhoods, though just 4% claim to regularly get their news there.

Taking a deeper look into the overall percentage of a social media network’s users who get their news there, Twitter is on top for 2022 at 53%, followed by Facebook at 44%.

The most important trend to note is that the old-guard social media networks's numbers are shrinking for audience news consumption. Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch are on the upswing.

Finally, Pew provides an interesting breakdown of the self-reported demographics of their panel of 12,147 respondents(Opens in a new window) for this four-day survey. The table shows, for example, that Facebook is looked to for news by more women than men, by more users ages 30 to 49, and predominantly by white people. Men seem to prefer YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn for news.

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People who went to college stick with LinkedIn for headlines. Younger people (ages 18 to 29) lean heavily on Snapchat and TikTok for news. For all the social networks, more people identifying as Democrats or leaning left in their politics use them for news. (I wonder where the right-wingers go for their info; what a mystery!)

For more insights, read the full report at Pew Research(Opens in a new window).

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Survey: Which Media Platforms Are Most Popular Across Age Groups?

Note: This article is based on Variety Intelligence Platform’s special report “Demographic Divide,” available solely to subscribers.

Entertainment is an industry ever evolving. From silent black-and-white pictures in theaters to 4K videos able to be beamed into any house or mobile device, the industry has never been one to sit still.

Yet the last few years have seen the number of innovations quicken considerably. Whereas once entertainment innovation was the advent of cable television and networks aimed at different audiences, now there are many platforms, from video games to social media to streaming services, competing for their share of engagement time.

This is apparent when looking at which platforms the 15-29s are most likely to use in a typical week. VIP+ partnered with consumer insights experts GetWizer to understand the differences in media and entertainment consumption and attitudes by age for the second version of the “Demographic Divide” report and found that no traditional media source cracks the top 10 most used platforms for the youngest group of consumers.

(To see the top 40 platforms for 15-29s, 30-44s, 45-59s and 60+, dig into the full report).

Instead, the most popular platforms are subscription streaming and social media platforms. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for flexible-thinking traditional media firms but will require a difference in attitude regarding content.

Many media companies currently treat social media and YouTube as repositories for clipped versions of media properties. Yet with younger consumers increasingly unlikely to climb the ladder to the source, embracing content distribution via the channels young consumers are using will be key to maintaining relevancy and maximizing audience scale.

It is a very different story when looking at the most used platforms among 45-59s. While new-media brands Facebook and Netflix see the greatest frequency among consumers, the four major broadcast networks each are placed within the top 10 (and can be expected to increase once the NFL returns in the fall), as does FM radio.

The differences between age groups highlights an issue facing marketers. Older consumers typically use a much smaller number of entertainment formats on average than those under 45. This is important because it means that younger consumers are more widely spread out across media platforms, with fewer available at any one service. Thus, reaching them with advertising requires greater spend across more platforms, driving up costs for marketers as well as increasing the complexity of reaching targets.

As noted, this is also something traditional media must employ in order to reach younger audiences. VIP+ recently noted that awards shows geared toward younger viewers, such as the MTV VMAs, would be better off partnering with TikTok or YouTube than sticking with a medium the demo no longer watches. The results of this demographic divide demonstrate that media must now move to where the audiences are rather than pretending they will return to where they once were.

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