Pew Research Center: Only 8% of American adults get news from Twitter

The latest research report released by the Pew Research Center on Monday shows that only 16% of adults in the United States use Twitter, and only 8% of adults get news information through the social network. In contrast, 30% of American adults get news information through Facebook.

For the survey, Pew interviewed more than 5,000 U.S. adults, including 736 Twitter users and 3,268 Facebook users, and analyzed conversations on Twitter surrounding major news events.

Although Twitter does not have a large share of the news consumption market, its users are high-quality users. Most of them are young, educated, and well-off. Nearly half of Twitter news users are between the ages of 18 and 29, 40% of Twitter news users have at least a bachelor's degree, and 48% of Twitter news users have an annual income of more than $75,000.

Moreover, Twitter news users tend to get news information from mobile devices more than other US users. Among all Twitter news users, 85% have used smartphones or tablets to get news information. However, for all US users, only 40% use mobile devices to get news information.

To study how Twitter users consume news, Pew analyzed Twitter conversations around a number of popular news events, including the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and a U.S. Supreme Court hearing on gay marriage.

Pew found three main characteristics of Twitter through research: First, Twitter's core function is to continuously spread the latest developments of news events; second, people's emotions about news events are constantly changing and developing, for example, after the Supreme Court hearing, people's support for gay marriage rose from 32% to 43%. Third, Twitter users' emotions are often different from the general public's emotions.

As Twitter plans to go public (expected on the 7th of this month), the experience of users of the social network will definitely change. Once the company goes public, Twitter must find the best balance between winning the favor of users and pleasing Wall Street.