Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic dismantles the commonly believed history of the Web by showing that the majority of web site traffic doesn’t come from social media like Facebook and Twitter.
There are a couple of really interesting ramifications of this data. First, on the operational side, if you think optimizing your Facebook page and Tweets is “optimizing for social,” you’re only halfway (or maybe 30 percent) correct. The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut.
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