Why You Should Build A Social Distribution Site Today by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, June 25, 2014 The teenagers of today are our future customers. And most of them don’t find websites very useful or interesting. So, where do they get their information, news and product recommendations? Social media apps, is the almost inevitable answer. Niche has released results of a survey of over 7,000 high-school students and the single big takeaway is that for teenagers, social is everything. Even the biggest teen-attracting websites such as Reddit, BuzzFeed and CollegeHumor in combination attract fewer visitors and less engagement than Tumblr, which is often regarded as having a primarily adult-female user-base. Derek Thompson makes the point that this means that optimizing social distribution of content is now what matters: “Content is king, but distribution is the kingdom.” Last year, Facebook’s outbound links to publishers grew from 62 million to 161 million. Facebook now sends 3.5 times the traffic to BuzzFeed than Google does. This is a sign of what is coming – and it means that whatever we are doing online, we need to be doing it in a way that is mobile-oriented and social-shareable. This movement towards social distribution is already a popular tactic for performance marketers, but every new piece of survey data makes the need for it more obvious. Derek Thompson again: “Websites are much smaller than social networks. If you’re confused why digital publishers obsess over Facebook and social media, make this graph your smartphone wallpaper. Even the most popular site among teens—BuzzFeed—has fewer daily visitors than any network or app in the graph. (Even Beats, which is considered a tiny music service, has more daily users than any website in the survey.) Seventy three percent of teens don’t read BuzzFeed, 84 percent don’t read Reddit, and 96 percent don’t read Mashable or Gawker. For young people, Facebook is the newspaper, and websites are the authors.” If you want to be ahead of this fast-moving wave, you can see more great data representations in which you can slice and dice the data on Niche: http://ink.niche.com/best-worst-media-habits-class-2014/2/ Derek Thompson link: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/facebook-texting-teens-instagram-snapchat-most-popular-social-network/373043/ Filed under: Marketing 2.0, Revenue Tagged under: Industry Trends, News, Social Distribution, Social Media About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.