Most Twitter traffic goes to news, movie sites

This piece of research from the Chitika network is worth noting. The main destination from Twitter is news websites (28%), followed by movie sites (23%).

This links into something I posted about the other day, that there is pretty much a 3-4 hour news cycle between things breaking online and hitting mainstream media, and that’s the window you have to take control of events. That’s because Twitter, with a high concentration of bloggers and journalists using it, more often than not acts as a bridge to other media.

According to Chitika, “From being the first to publish pictures of a Turkish Airlines plane crash to the social network’s breaking of US Airways Flight 1549′s dramatic crash into the Hudson River earlier this year, Twitter’s instantaneous and collaborative nature has made it out to be the bleeding edge of all news.”

Facebook by comparison, links more to tech and lifestyle sites and less to news – showing that it’s ‘less real time’ and fast moving than Twitter.

Earlier research showed that 20% of tweets are in some shape or form about brands.

So: 20% of tweets about brands + news the biggest destination from Twitter + the four hour online news cycle = a fairly volatile cocktail for any brand caught on the wrong end of the twittersphere.

Via Web Pro News