A new study has found that social media channels are being used more than ever before to find breaking news stories.
In fact, according to 72Point, a specialist in PR, social news feeds are now the go-to place for British people to catch up on current events.
With the study showing just how important social media has become in the UK as a replied upon source for quality content and information, it was added that people are now expecting the news to come to them.
Of the 7,500 people that were polled, just over a third (34%) reported that they chose to find news via social media channels. The ‘media consumers’, as they were identified in the survey, also revealed that they used smartphones the most to check up on world events (62%). This was followed by personal laptops (57%), tablets (39%), and then desktops (33%).
However, it was discovered that there were marked differences between the social media habits of men and women.
Males were found to favour searching through the news feeds of LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ for content, while females preferred Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook, which have been described as the more ‘visual’ social platforms. Such data would prove useful to internet marketing companies that were hoping to target specific audiences.
Meanwhile, when it came to searching for and sharing content, it was revealed that 49% of men would use a search engine, whereas 37% of women would make use of social media channels. In Britain, the five most popular digital sources for news content were the Mail Online, the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, the Sun and Metro.
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