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Publishing content about breaking news and major events can bring a huge amount of traffic to a content publisher's site, but did you know that the level of sharing on social media sites depends on the type of event?According to the Q13 2014 Consumer Sharing Trends Report from ShareThis, social sharing of major events reaches its peak within 24 hours of the event with shares related to major events garnering five times more clickbacks than the average social media post.As a content publisher, writing about major events can mean a spike in traffic, which can turn into long-term, loyal readers if the event ties to the rest of your Authoritative Content. That means you need to focus on two things. First, choose to publish content about major events that are highly relevant to your brand promise and meaningful to your audience. Second, you need to make sure that you're sharing your content about major events on the right social media sites to get the biggest response.The ShareThis study, which analyzed sharing activities of more than 450 million unique users across 2.5 million websites and apps, found that Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are all key social media sites where people go to get information and share information about breaking news and major events. However, you'll want to focus on one site more than the others if you publish content about specific topics.Let's take a closer look at the data from the study.If you publish content about entertainment events, focus on sharing your content on Facebook where social sharing about entertainment-related content is shared more than twice as much as it is on Twitter or Reddit. However, if you publish content related to real-time sports events, focus on Twitter where sharing related to the NFL kickoff were shared far more than they were on Facebook or Reddit. If you write about international news events, share your content through Reddit where 2.6x more sharing is done on international news than is done on Facebook or Twitter.Furthermore, consider not just real-time sharing of content related to breaking news but also discussions that happen weeks later. ShareThis found that sharing on Twitter and Reddit is very reactive (Twitter is the most reactive) with people expecting quick responses and updates. However, sharing on Facebook is less reactive. Sharing is done for discussion purposes. Therefore, major event content sharing often happens on Facebook after-the-fact, while the majority of sharing about major events is done on Twitter within days of the event.Bottom-line, if you publish content about major events with the goal to increase traffic to your site, make sure those events are relevant to your audience and share them on the right social media sites to boost your results.Image: Opensource.com licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

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