NPR surveyed its own audiences on Twitter and Facebook in 2010 and found the two behaved differently enough to warrant different strategies. Twitter followers got all or most of their news online, prioritised hard breaking news, and clicked on fewer links than Facebook fans did.
The referral numbers made the point sharper. NPR had more than three million Twitter followers across multiple accounts and 1.25 million Facebook users, and in any given month the much larger Twitter audience delivered “less than a fifth of the amount of referral traffic” that Facebook did. Twitter was, in NPR’s own words, “an ideal way of getting headlines to our users” — suited to alerts and updates because of its immediacy and short form — but headline reach did not convert into visits.
The conclusion NPR drew was that Facebook was the better platform for engagement and community building, and Twitter the better one for distribution of breaking news. That division of labour between a broadcast channel and a conversation channel became standard practice across newsrooms in the years afterwards.