Media failing to 'tell stories that are interesting' for young people, says Buzzfeed president

Jon Steinberg offered both journalists and marketers interested in content marketing a few handy tips on how to improve online engagement at a recent MIPCOM session.

Criticising traditional media for focusing too much of SEO-optimised strategies and failing to keep their content interesting and attractive to younger audiences, Steinberg explained how creating shareable and ‘social’ content is the best content marketing strategy around.

According to statistics reported by QuantCast, Steinberg is in a perfect position to share advice about building audiences and drawing in traffic, with statistics revealing the site gained almost 86 million unique visits during September of this year; not bad for a company that has only been in operation since 2006.

Commenting on the fact that much of the mainstream media has failed to grasp the opportunities that can come with a young readership, Steinberg said: “We feel strongly that traditional media have given up on young people, and have not made a commitment to tell stories that are interesting for people under 40 or 50 years old.

Due to these failures, Steinberg announced that Buzzfeed has begun shifting its roots in “kittens and meme content” and venturing into the world of hard news in a bid to plug the gap in the market that sees young audiences left at the wayside.

Having a successful grasp of social media is also essential to any kind of website looking to garner traffic, with Steinberg revealing that 40% of Buzzfeed’s traffic now comes from Facebook, and 70% of it coming from other “social sources“. News must be created for the “social web” which is powered through sharing, the expert said, with less focus on out-of-date SEO strategies.

Old strategies that ensured news was SEO-optimised and focused on climbing the Google search ladder “Allowed people to write very boring news that was aggregated and unoriginal,” Steinberg said, “And that doesn’t work well on social. The most important thing you can do is to think to yourself ‘why would somebody share this content?’ And that’s very high-quality content.”