In the arms race that is the social web, every publisher large or small is trying whatever weapons they can find to rise above the noise and increase their readership: some, like The Independent or the Daily Mail, have chosen to go the clickbait route and try to duplicate the success of ViralNova or BuzzFeed. But Jason Seiken, editor-in-chief of Telegraph Media Group, says the newspaper publisher has seen a significant increase in readership by doing two somewhat surprising things: paying less attention to Twitter (s twtr), and posting fewer stories.

Seiken told The Guardian that the site saw a 20-percent increase in traffic in June, with daily unique browsers hitting almost 4 million, and he attributed this jump to some of the strategies the newspaper has been focusing on over the past few months — including developing the paper’s Facebook (s fb) audience, which has almost tripled in…