Oct 31, 2013 02:20 PM EDT By Jaleesa Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

One in three Americans get their news through Facebook, according to a recent study Reuters reported.

Almost 80 percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center admitted they come across news when they are checking up on friends or sharing photos on the social networking site. Heavy news consumers did not describe Facebook as an important source of news, the study found.

"Overall, about half of adult Facebook users, or 47 percent, 'ever' get news there," Pew said in its report. "That amounts to 30 percent of the population." 

According to the study, about two-thirds of all U.S. adults use Facebook, the world's largest social media site. The site displays a stream where people and publishers can share news. Only 4 percent of Facebook news consumers said the platform is the most important way they obtain their news.

"People go to Facebook to share personal moments - and they discover the news almost incidentally," Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at Pew, said in a statement.

According to Reuters, social media is playing an increasingly important role in how people find news. The trend is prominent among young people who prefer to get news through platforms like Twitter or Facebook rather than traditional forms of print or broadcast television.

An earlier study found that 34 percent of people aged 18 to 24 consume news through social media compared with 10 percent of adults between the ages of 50 and 64.

The recent Pew study found adults between the ages of 18 and 29 account for a third of Facebook news.

The study also showed that Facebook users are not discriminating when it comes to the source of news. According to the study, 70 percent of those surveyed said they click on news stories because of interest in the topic, while only 20 percent said they read a story based on the news organization.

The survey was conducted Aug. 21 through Sept. 2 among 5,173 U.S. adults including Facebook users.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all experimenting with ways to aggregate and share news as a way to keep people coming back to their platforms. Facebook announced on Monday that referral traffic to publishers' sites increased 170 percent through the past year, according to Reuters.

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