Earlier this month, Heather Hopkins, an online marketing analyst for Hitwise Intelligence, reported that Google users gravitate toward print media, while Facebookers flock to broadcast media–but what about Twitterers?

In her recent article, “Twitter Users Don’t Read the News, Do Share Photos and Socialize,”she added Twitter to the mix to see where its users landed. Although Twitter often generates a great deal of buzz about big news stories, the data from Hitwise reveals that Twitter’s traffic rarely flows back to the originating media sites. In fact, the downstream traffic for the category of “News and Media” came in at a trifling 0.14 of one percent. In stark contrast, photos and video, which comprise the category of “Entertainment,” made up nearly one-third of the traffic. Social networking sites finished a close second with just under 30 percent of downstream Twitter visits.

SSN Take: As your social media strategy unfolds, it’s extremely valuable to know how each social network fills out major categories like “News and Media,” “Social Networks” and “Entertainment.” With regard to Twitter, refer to the graph from the article to clearly see the lopsided trend taking place.

David Hardt, March 25, 2010

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