It remains to be seen whether newspapers will one day cease to exist as we know them today. While there is something to be said for waking up on a Saturday morning to a cup of coffee and a fresh edition of that day’s news, even those who have been living under rocks know that newspaper readership has been dwindling in recent years and the future of the industry remains uncertain.
It’s not that people have stopped caring about news. Rather, the way in which that news is digested has changed. According to recent research, 64.5 percent of Americans consume their news online today. What’s more, the traffic that social media has directed toward news sites has increased 57 percent since 2009.
According to an infographic compiled by the University of Florida, in 2012 there were 2.4 billion Internet users across the globe, 1.4 billion (58 percent) of whom used social media. That’s a pretty impressive figure, considering that Facebook, for example, just recently celebrated its 10th birthday.
Thanks to this digital revolution, the landscape for marketers of all kinds of content has changed. And what’s happening in the news industry is something that cannot be forgotten, as businesses begin placing more emphasis on creating custom content. Social media is where marketers should direct a majority of their focus, considering the fact that:
- There are 1.4 billion people on Facebook.
- Ninety-eight percent of 18- to 24-year-olds use social media.
- Each month, 490 million unique visitors flock to YouTube.
- More than 645 million people have registered on Twitter.
Of course, the sheer number of statistics that should encourage marketers to make certain that social media is central to their content strategies doesn’t stop there; the list is virtually endless. But as time progresses and more and more potential customers flock to social media networks, the importance of marketers shifting their attention in that direction continues to increase.
While consensus has already formed around the fact that custom content is the future of marketing, deciding how to unleash such content onto the world remains in question. But statistics don’t lie, which is why social media is as good a bet as any.
