People are quicker to share than read news on Twitter, according to a new study conducted by Columbia University and the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA).
The tiny fraction of headlines that news editors push out on Twitter draw a large share of eyeballs, but it is the
stories recommended by friends that trigger more clicks, the study found.
Social media in 2014 overtook organic search as the top way people accessed content on the web, driving 30 per cent of all traffic.
Facebook and Twitter, filter and personalise news for users and closely track the results, but because this data is
fundamental to their advertising business very little is made public.
From the one per cent of tweets made public by Twitter, the researchers picked all URLs linked to five news outlets
BBC, Huffington Post, CNN, New York Times and Fox during a one-month period last summer.The goal was to find out which stories in their sample of tweets would be shared and clicked on more.
For those willing to read, the study finds that stories on Twitter have a relatively long shelf life.
While more than 90 per cent of links in the study were shared within a few hours, most links were clicked on, and
presumably read, much later; 70 per cent of clicks happened after the first hour, and 18 per cent happened in the second week, the study found.
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