Following their report that Facebook has just beaten Google again as the U.S. most visited site, Hitwise is now reporting another Facebook triumph. This time is has something to do with where people go to if they want to know the latest and most breaking news. Opsie! Sorry folks, you’re wrong, not from Twitter but from Facebook.

According to Hitwise, Twitter is only at the no.39 of the list of which sites people go for breaking news. And you’ve guessed it right, Facebook is almost at the lead, landing at the no. 3 spot. It even beat Google which is at eleventh place.

Additionally, Facebook drives 3.64% traffic to news and media sites, followed by Google  with 1.27% and Twitter accounting for only 0.14% of traffic driven to those sites.

Now, here’s a rather interesting point raised by Hitwise’s data. Twitter visits may have more than doubled and yet where could these visitors go to right after they’ve gone through Twitter.com? According to the report, majority of those visitors go to social networking and entertainment sites.

But wait, how come then that Twitter is hailed as the new media news source if it doesn’t even comes close to Facebook as leader in driving traffic to news sites. Venture Beat has an interesting analysis. According to VB, those news posted on Twitter timeline came from variety of sources. And most often than not those tweets do not link back to the “traditional media” source of news. Another reason is the fact that most of the news reported by Twitter users are based on their experiences and were not yet reported by news media sites.

There you go folks, it looks like we need to call Facebook as the new king of new media news source and take the title away from Twitter now.

Originally posted on March 16, 2010 @ 5:00 pm