Many, many people read tweets about today's earthquake before they felt it. That's because:
1) Seismic waves travel at about 3-5 km/s
2) Fiber signals travel somewhere around 200,000 km/s (minus network latency, but still very fast)
Whenever there is a major event, any kind of event, people start tweeting about it, typically within 20-30 seconds after it starts.
That means that the seismic waves of this earthquake travelled about 60-150 miles before they were overtaken by the tweets announcing it.
Here in Michigan, I'm about 650 km from the epicenter of today's earthquake. It took the waves from the earthquake about 3 minutes to get to me. Tweets would have arrived (if you add in network latency) about a second after they were sent, so 21-31 seconds after the event.
The tweets beat the event by about 2.5 minutes. Facebook and other social networks are much slower, mainly because they require more effort to post something.
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