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Many of these digital organizations emphasize the importance of social media in storytelling and engaging their audiences.

How do social media sites stack up on news?

Facebook is the obvious news powerhouse among the social media sites. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use the site, and half of those users get news there — amounting to 30% of the general population.

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Facebook kicked off the summer of 2014 with a controversy that affected nearly 700,000 users. For one week in early 2012, the social network conducted an experiment to determine whether it could change the emotional state of some users by filtering the posts that showed up in their news feeds. (Spoiler alert: It could.) Many experts called Facebook's actions unethical.

roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use the site, and half of those users get news there—amounting to 30% of the general population. YouTube has the next greatest reach in terms of general usage, at 51% of U.S. adults. Thus, even though only a fifth of its users get news there, that amounts to 10% of the adult population, which puts it on par with Twitter. Twitter reaches just 16% of U.S. adults, but half (8% of U.S. adults) use it for news. reddit is a news destination for nearly two-thirds of its users (62%). But since just 3% of the U.S. population uses reddit, that translates to 2% of the population that gets news there.

LinkedIn news consumers stand out from other groups as more likely to be high earners and college educated.

A look at the five social networking sites with the biggest news audiences shows that a majority of news consumers on those sites (65%) get news from just one, and for 85% of those, it is Facebook.

as the number of devices a person owns increases, they are more likely to report that they enjoy keeping up with the news and are more likely to say that it’s easier to keep up with the news today than it was five years ago.

People continue to discover news through traditional word-of- mouth (65 percent) either in person or over the phone, and do so at higher rates than more modern methods of sharing like email, text message, or other ways online (46 percent), or social media (44 percent). And roughly half of Americans said they got news in the last week from search engines and online news aggregators (51 percent for each).

they are discriminating in how much trust they have in the information they get from each method.

Just 28% of Facebook news consumers have ever used Facebook to keep up with a news event as it unfolds, and, of those, less than half (41%) say Facebook is one of the first places they turn to keep up with such an event.

64%, say that they at least sometimes click on links to news stories. Still, just 16% do this often

he biggest single reason named for clicking on links about news stories is interest in the topic. Seven-in-ten (70%) of those who ever click on news stories say this is a major reason they do so; 45% cite the fact that they are already following the story in the news. Other popular reasons for clicking on news stories are that the story seemed funny or entertaining (51%) or surprising (50%).

78% of Facebook news users mostly see news when on Facebook for other reasons.

Just 34% of Facebook news consumers “like” a news organization or individual journalist, which suggests that the news they see there is coming from friends

Not only are social network users sharing news stories, but, particularly with the growth in mobile devices, a certain portion is contributing to the reporting by taking photos or videos.

Izea, a firm that has ridden the trends of sponsored content and social media by connecting companies with celebrities and personalities, is announcing today that it has raised $12 million in new funding

The 7-year-old company has already raised $24 million in four rounds of funding, bu

Forbes and even The New York Times saying they're doing sponsored posts.

Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures.

Tight Crowd:

highly interconnected people with few isolated participants.

That includes new “Promoted Pins” from large national brands, but now it will also include paid placement for small and medium-sized businesses as well, with a new self-serve product it’s announcing today.

Pinterest’s new Promoted Pins product will enable its partners to only pay the company if users actually click through and view the content they’re promoting. In that way, Pinterest’s those ads aren’t that different from conversion-based links that might appear alongside Google’s search results, or performance-based display ads sold on a cost-per-click basis.

Pinterest still needs to figure out the optimal mix of Promoted Pins to content shared by other Pinners in a user’s feed.

Even sites such as digital native buzzfeed.com and National Public Radio’s npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly.

Of the sites examined, the percentage of direct visitors who also came to the site via Facebook was extremely small, ranging from 0.9% to 2.3%, with the exception of Buzzfeed at 11.3%

Facebook and search are critical for bringing added eyeballs to individual stories, and they do so in droves.

Teenagers with big social followings are making thousands of dollars pushing brands.

"making a thousand dollars a day is by no means unrealistic" for influencers.

"It’s great that 16- and 17 year-olds are making $500 a day in revenue

86% of Americans were willing to have an in-person conversation about the surveillance program, but just 42% of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to post about it on those platforms.

In both personal settings and online settings, people were more willing to share their views if they thought their audience agreed with them. Fo

social media did not provide new forums for those who might otherwise remain silent to express their opinions and debate issues.

These posts, which may read, "You'll never believe what happens next!" or "This will blow your mind," have grown more common as brands try to improve click rates and visibility in users' news feeds

That’s because, as of mid-January, the social network will intensify its efforts to filter out unpaid promotional material in user news feeds that businesses have posted as status updates.

Businesses that post free marketing pitches or reuse content from existing ads will suffer “a significant decrease in distribution,” Facebook warned in a post earlier this month announcing the coming change.

More than 80% of small companies using social media to promote their businesses list Facebook as their top marketing tool, followed by LinkedIn and Twitter, according to a recent survey of 2,292 small businesses by Webs, a digital services division of Vistaprint

Ello revealed on Thursday that it raised $5.5 million in a Series A funding round. The company also announced that it has become a legal public benefit corporation, or PBC.

Ello raised $435,000 in seed funding from Vermont-based FreshTracks Capital in March. Its new Series A round is led by FreshTracks and two Boulder-based groups: Bullet Time Ventures (an investor in Jukely, a live event recommendation service) and Foundry Group (which invested in fitness tracking firm FitBit and crowdfunded apparel retailer Betabrand).

It’s worth noting that a number of brands, such as Netflix and Sonos, have created Ello pages. As digital strategist Ben Breier writes, branded content is a form of advertising.

Why Viber? Simply, Viber is the messaging app with the greatest scale that is most open to being bought.

Kakao Talk: 150 million users,

Viber: still in its early days of making money, claims 280 million registered users and has raised no external money (that’s a big potential pay day)