So here’s something interesting: social media is beginning to surpass online search as the top referrer to other websites:

This news was enough to make the New York Times take notice in a recent piece about BuzzFeed, which just scored a new $50 million investment (its valuation is now at $850 million).

Don’t know BuzzFeed?  It’s a news aggregation site for everything, everywhere.  You’ve probably seen it pop up on your Facebook feed since so many people share its sillier stuff, like quizzes that will tell you how good you are at spelling or which European city you are.  There’s also hard news written by BuzzFeed staff journalists.

BuzzFeed attracts 150 million viewers every month, on average.  Its content is what is driving its growth, and it plans to plow a lot more investment money into creating more content.  And not just content...viral content.  That’s stuff that’s likely to get shared.

And BuzzFeed works very hard to get its content shared on social media, to good effect.  The Shareholic data on the chart above is from its latest quarterly report on traffic referrals to the 350,000 websites in its network. 

Facebook is now responsible for 23.4% of social media traffic referrals to those sites.  Just one year ago, 40% of traffic came from search engines and 14% came from social media sites.  Today, search and social account for 29% of traffic each. 

So what does this mean for you?  A great opportunity to take a page from BuzzFeed’s strategy book and spread your content liberally on social media to drive traffic to your blog or website.