Even among users who are not on the platform, Twitter is one of the most popular social platforms when it comes to news engagement. As was mentioned by some users, the news is one of the primary activities of Twitter accounts, aside from using it to have fun and pass time. The users of Twitter get to visit the platform as many times as possible daily to get news feeds on recent events and happenings. Most of which they come across on their timelines, news links, and tweets from the accounts they follow.
According to a recent report, about 74% of Twitter users visit the social platform mainly for news. That’s a huge number of users the platform accommodates, you can say. Only about 2% mentioned that they get their news stories from elsewhere and not Twitter. With the huge percentage of users confirming the platform as a great source for getting breaking news, it is no wonder Twitter continues to grow with more engagement.
The use of the Twitter platform for getting news updates is made much more convenient for users because they can comment on any topic shared, share it outside the platform, or retweet it among friends, and also post about anything newsworthy and fun on their accounts for other users to engage with. Twitter users tend to follow new journalists, writers, and other news-worthy accounts and also share their tweets even beyond the Twitter platform.
Most Twitter users have stated that they get news by just scrolling through their timelines for trending topics or browsing through the tweets of other users’ accounts they follow. All of this is done for fun. Twitter is so much more convenient for users since it can be accessed from any device, particularly smartphones.
The growth of newspaper Twitter accounts seems to be going off steam because most news tweets can be shared across multiple platforms outside of the Twitter platform, allowing even non-users of Twitter access to the majority of the news feed from Twitter. About 8% of the news articles are actually obtained from newspaper accounts, with the other percent gotten from retweets from friends and other influential and individual accounts on Twitter.
It has been noticed that more people on Twitter would rather follow individual journalists than the main news agencies’ accounts. This is because Twitter now allows users to get breaking news tweets and live news broadcasts on their timeline, making it more visible and engaging for users instead of waiting for a newspaper account to put the news up as usual. News on Twitter allows so much engagement and has not stopped being ranked as one of the social platforms for getting news updates. The only difference is that newspaper accounts are gradually becoming obsolete because users get the news even before it is made available on these accounts.
Final thoughts
Twitter and news are linked together and it is one platform where news consumption is growing with more users signing up and that has made way breaking news and stories appear to be more visible and also engaging.
