Forget the home page, it’s dead and buried

I have long suspected that internet home pages were dying. You just have to be a regular user of the internet for news, to know the news finds you, via social media shares, as opposed to you typing in a URL.

So the final evidence came to me, via my social news app, ZITE, as I wandered upon a blog post from Quartz.

The Home Page is Dead and the Social Web has Won – even at The New York Times, the headline screamed at me.

Sure enough Quartz had got hold of information from BuzzFeed of the NYT internal review of its digital strategy and not only was the evidence stark, with traffic to the newspapers home page falling by half, the visual image of the chart, really made me sit up.

The social web has won and media owners need to get to grips with matters right here, right now.

Not only that whilst the traffic has been in decline for years, so to is the traffic declining to the New York Times mobile apps for both the home page and the section headers. The report describes the decline as significant.

The main lesson in all this is that we don’t go and find content, nor do we get pulled into content, not even apps “pull media”, we push media. Information, photos, video, news articles are pushed to you via social networks and friends. We allow our network of likeminded people to push the media most relevant to us.

The decline in the type of behavior that seeks out and checks news at regular time is getting lower and lower.

The end game is nigh for anyone relying on traditional methods of distributing content, news or information. It is time to build a strategic social distribution for your content, products, news and events.

Three key tips to this is:

• Understand your audience and map their social network
• Make sure your information is being published more than daily in these networks
• Encourage or be scientific about “advocacy and recommenders” – those people with a high propensity to advocate and syndicate your content on your behalf

Don’t expect anyone to come to your shiny website or mobile app. We are overwhelmed with mobile app options, with information; make sure it arrives to your audience by a smart social media distribution strategy.

Fi Bendall is the managing director of Bendalls Group, a team of highly trained digital specialists, i-media subject matter experts and developers.