Survey claims that Facebook is growing in directing online news traffic, while Twitter barely registers
Traffic to news sites is increasingly being led by Facebook a study has found, although Google is still the main online reference service, with Twitter barely receiving a mention.
According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in America, which studied the 25 most popular US news websites for the first nine months of 2010, 40% of news was driven by external reference systems including Google Search and Yahoo.
Most of the sites also said that they had seen traffic being driven through social networking site Facebook, which was rated as either the second or third most important driver for online traffic.
Another popular social media site Twitter however, was ‘barely’ mentioned as a reference source by the study with only the Los Angeles Times claiming to have recieved more than 1% of traffic through Twitter.
Making up the 25 sites involved in the study were 11 newspapers; The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post , the Boston Globe , the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune and Britain's Daily Mail. Also included were TV networks MSNBC, CNN, ABC, Fox, CBS and the BBC -- and Google News, the Examiner, Topix and Bing News.
Rueters, Yahoo! News, AOL and The Huffington Post were also included.