Want to increase your readership? Forget about Twitter and stop posting so many stories, says the Telegraph

gigaom /Mathew Ingram reporting:
In the arms race that is the social web, every publisher large or small is trying whatever weapons they can find to rise above the noise and increase their readership: some, like The Independent or the Daily Mail, have chosen to go the clickbait route and try to duplicate the success of ViralNova or BuzzFeed. But Jason Seiken, editor-in-chief of Telegraph Media Group, says the newspaper publisher has seen a significant increase in readership by doing two somewhat surprising things: paying less attention to Twitter, and posting fewer stories.
Seiken told The Guardian that the site saw a 20-percent increase in traffic in June, with daily unique browsers hitting almost 4 million, and he attributed this jump to some of the strategies the newspaper has been focusing on over the past few months — including developing the paper’s Facebook audience, which has almost tripled in size to 1.6 million, rather than focusing on Twitter.
The Telegraph executive said that in the past, the paper had not spent as much time on a Facebook strategy because of what he called an obsession among journalists with using Twitter. “Journalists are all on Twitter, and obsessed with it, so that is where the energy had gone,” he said. “An assumption had been made without looking at data” on where readers were actually coming from.
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Interestingly enough, Seiken said the Telegraph had also been deliberately reducing the number of stories it posted, and focusing instead on putting more resources into fewer pieces. “We actually created that huge traffic jump in June producing fewer stories, not more,” he told The Guardian, adding that the paper had changed the way the newsroom worked in order to become more efficient. “Seemingly mundane things make a huge difference – things such as better planning, more creative story conferences, and using audience data to decide what to stop doing.”
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/01/want-to-increase-your-readership-forget-about-twitter-and-stop-posting-so-many-stories-says-the-telegraph/?utm_source=GeneralUsers&utm_campaign=465ad55d21-c:mdad:08-02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dd83065c6-465ad55d21-99152541