Reports recently out say that the Telegraph online attracts an impressive 8% of its traffic from
news aggregators and social networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

The 8% figure is equivalent to a staggering 75,000 unique visitors daily. So, how does the Telegraph do it?

Over the last 12-18 months, the Telegraph has introduced a series of changes destined at creating not just a more efficient newsroom but also at positioning itself as one of the UK's leading newspapers and news site, from introducing an in-house technology lab dedicated to developing creative editorial projects to merging its print and digital operations. Focussing on the expansion of its online venture has been an additional such measure, with a special media strategy aimed at enticing a generation of younger readers over to the site.

Speaking to internet consultant Malcolm Coles, head of audience development for the Telegraph, Julian Sambles disclosed the figure in response to questions for an article written by Coles for information technology website Fumsi.

Social sites as a valuable news tool for journalists

In his article, Coles argues that alternative social sites like the ones listed above "are increasingly replacing traditional ways of finding information on the Internet." These sites have been constructed in such a way that users are encouraged to submit and recommend content to friends or contacts.

Coles ventures further, taking an analytical approach to these sites in order to determine how they may be used by people (anyone) specifically for the purposes of tracking down interesting content. Referring to Twitter, Coles says that "by 'following' the right people (i.e. receiving their tweets), you'll discover new content quicker than any other method - and find out people's reactions to it." He also talks about the "#" symbol (or the hashtag), which when used before a word, alerts people to the fact that the sender would like his tweet to be made easy to track down by anyone interested.

Social exchange sites including Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and - I would add here - Facebook give members the ability to not just recommend content, but also to rate the quality of any posted feeds, while individuals can filter stories based on their own personal preferences. Algorithms within the sites suggest feeds that members may be interested in by identifying other contacts with similar interests.

Delicious, on the other hand, is a social bookmarking site which allows users to bookmark a webpage by tagging them with any label the user wishes to apply. What makes the site particularly powerful as a news-filtering tool is that users can share their bookmarks with others, so anyone who enters the same tag will stumble upon all the relevant (and shared) book pages, in effect meaning you already know what the page is about before you have even visited it, as Coles observes. Although the sites are not yet sophisticated enough to link two different articles talking about the same thing which have been given two separate tags. Nor can the sites distinguish between articles where the same tag has been used to convey two very different ideas. To use Coles example: how is a site to differentiate between "row" (argument) or "row" (as in "row" boat)?

Nevertheless, all the sites effectively provide a valuable marketing tool by giving analysts and followers an idea of public reaction to things such as an event, product launch or news story and organisations could - some already have - learn to use these sites to test drive an idea or concept before introducing it to the mainstream. From a news-gathering perspective, there is no reason why the same should not apply.

Potential pitfalls

Although, as Coles notes, there are some risks involved when relying on social media in this manner. Firstly, given access to these sites are open to anyone, people or companies can manipulate results by creating multiple accounts and voting or selecting items based on their corporate bias; using fake accounts, some firms, for instance, have been known to vote for their own pages or leave lots of overly-positive messages when commenting on their own "walls" or overly-negative ones when commenting on the pages of their rivals.

Incorrect information which finds its way onto a social networking site is easily propagated and once it's "out there" it becomes very difficult to contain. The most recent example of this happened on encyclopaedia website Wikipedia, which although not a networking site, relies on the online community to add, verify, edit and update content, leaving it - some say - exposed to "virtual vandalism," as one student demonstrated when he recently duped some of the UK's top papers following his insertion of a bogus quotation.

The upside

Yet, despite these potential downsides, used intelligently these sites can yield interesting results. Besides, given the large communities of people the sites have garnered, they are to some extent self-correcting, with some sites even employing people to monitor submissions to ensure their authenticity.

The Telegraph is proof of this. The newspaper publishes an average of 500 articles on a daily basis, yet whilst all these articles can be located on the site, the newspaper doesn't simply rely on people to levitate towards their site. Instead, the Telegraph has taken a proactive attitude in order to maximise web traffic: "We have enabled all our stories to be submitted to these social sites by adding a "share this" button on every article. In each case users can then add their own headline and comments onto the article so enabling their point of view to get across,' Sambles tells Coles. "All of these articles can be found by coming to our site but relying on this alone will limit the size of our audience. By working on how this content can be distributed and found in the digital world we can (and have) greatly increased the audience that reads our rich content." An inspection of any article on the site reveals just how easy it is for a member of a social networking site to forward the item on literally at the touch of a button.

Social tools are also used on the Telegraph.co.uk site to show which stories are the most popular and will refer to relevant tweets, as in the case of their footballstats page, demonstrating that "social media functionality and tools are a consideration in the design and build of our site," as Sambles confirms.

Speaking about the Telegraph's ongoing commitment to developing the social and interactive elements of its site, Sambles also referred to the role that SEO has in attracting visitors, as previously covered by the Editors Weblog.

"In the changing role of newspapers in the digital world it is important that we have the ability to adapt and engage with new services and social media to ensure that our great content reaches the many people who are interested in reading it," says Sambles.

For more than a year the Telegraph has been leading the digital revolution within the newspaper world, prompting various theories from rival newspapers regarding the method used to achieve such results. Here's one from Jemima Kiss the Guardian's digital media reporter, published last August. ABCe figures for March show the Telegraph.co.uk surged ahead of previous top spot-holders the Sun.co.uk and the Guardian.co.uk.

Sadly, with perhaps the exception of the Guardian, the Times and tabloid paper the Sun, few other online newspaper sites have been able to emulate this success. There is no doubt that newspapers, in general, have not yet fully exploited the potential of social networking sites or news aggregators to optimise virtual dissemination of their content, much less to draw in more readers. If newspapers can educate their staff to ensure that the various editorial teams work together to share information found on sites and set up a system whereby articles are automatically uploaded onto these, there is no reason why other newspapers should not experience boosts in online traffic themselves.

Sources: Malcolm Coles , Fumsi , Hitwise , Econsultancy , Guardian.co.uk