as audiences adopt newer social networks, and people’s social activity becomes increasingly fragmented, other measures of social network activity become more important, especially for businesses trying to determine where to best allocate time and resources.

How much time users spend on each social network and how engaged and interactive they are with content there are increasingly important ways of evaluating the sites.

Americans spend more time on social media than any other major Internet activity, including email.

U.S. Android and iPhone users age 18 and over spend 65 percent more time each month using apps than they did just two years ago

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.

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%).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.