This year we have detailed data on the most popular social networks in each country – and the most popular for news. Previously we have only tracked these data for the UK while the Pew Research Center has published similar country data in the United States.¹ Our unique data from ten countries reveal that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+, and WhatsApp are by far the most important networks for news. Around half of Facebook (57%) and Twitter users (50%) say they find, share, or discuss a news story in a given week, but news is considerably less important in other networks. Only just over a quarter (29%) of YouTube users engage with news weekly, along with 19% of Instagram users. Reddit has a small but active community that is heavily engaged with news weekly (48%).

Internationally we can see significant variations in the extent different networks are used for news. Around 90% of Facebook users in Brazil and Italy use the network for news each week compared with less than half of those in the UK.

Twitter is popular in Spain, the UK, and Japan, but Google+ is far more extensively used in Germany, France, and Denmark. YouTube is used for news by 23% in France and 26% in Italy, but only by 6% in Denmark and 8% in the UK where there is very little professional news content distributed via YouTube.

Outside the big four, we find some important national and niche social networks. In Finland, Ampparit is a popular news aggregator similar to Digg or Reddit. Suomi24 is the most popular general discussion forum. Tuenti in Spain and Line in Japan are messaging networks operating in the same space as WhatsApp. Germany has a number of social networks including Xing, which competes across German-speaking countries with LinkedIn in business networking – also Stayfriends and Wer kennt wen. Orkut was once the biggest social network in Brazil but now attracts just 12% of our sample and Mixi has also been eclipsed by Facebook in Japan.

Emergence of WhatsApp

One intriguing finding is the extent that messaging apps are now being used for discovering and sharing news. WhatsApp – now owned by Facebook – is used by over half of our sample in Spain (60%) and over a quarter (26%) say they use it for news. A third of our sample in Brazil, Germany, and Italy also use WhatsApp on a weekly basis (32%, 30%, and 29% respectively).

Over the past 12 months a number of news organisations have developed specific services for Instagram – also owned by Facebook – as a way of reaching younger audiences and given their popularity we can expect attention to switch to messaging services like WhatsApp and Line.

Types of activity and participation

In the UK, we were able to ask Facebook and Twitter users more detailed information about how they accessed and participated with the news. In general, we find that Twitter users are more active than Facebook users – across a range of functions from browsing news feeds to discussing stories or sharing links. Twitter users are significantly more likely to check what’s new (65% vs 48%) or click and read a news story (57% vs 44%). Facebook users are slightly more likely to comment on a news story (33 vs 30%) and watch a news video (24% vs 19%).

News Lovers (heavy and frequent news users) are far more likely to use Twitter whereas a significant percentage of those accessing Facebook for news can be found in our Casual Users segment (low interest and frequency). This supports other research, which suggests Twitter users tend to go actively looking for news, whereas Facebook users tend to come across news as part of their browsing activity.

These themes are developed further in two essays about the use of social media in breaking news and a study of Twitter consumption around two stories (the Oscars and a political speech).