Stories covering social media and new technology logged the highest number of hits from Warc News' subscribers over the last 12 months.

Six of the top ten pieces from 2012 focused on social media. The most read article of the year looked at a study by Performics, a unit of Publicis Groupe, which showed how important social media was as a channel to reach US moms.

The research found that mothers were 16% more likely to visit Facebook every day than women without children. (For more details about the most popular material featured on Warc in 2012, click here.)

"Moms continue to take advantage of the little spare time they have by utilising all the tools at their disposal. This includes their mobile devices and social networks," Daina Middleton, global CEO of Performics, said.

Other social stories in the top ten included a piece on AB InBev's social strategy, brand performance on LinkedIn, and a report arguing that UK users had become "bored" of platforms like Facebook.

The four other members of the top ten showed a tech bias. One item looked at the attempts by major firms like Oracle, SAP and Adobe to build social and digital marketing platforms.

The rationale for this was delivered by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who said: "I think an increasingly common story is that the CMO is going to spend more on technology in a company than the CIO. That has not happened yet in most companies, but I believe that it will."

Also in the top ten was a piece on mobile readership habits, plus a discussion of the iPad's strong performance in the tablet satisfaction charts.

The tenth-placed story, and the only one without a distinct social or tech theme, looked at Procter & Gamble's decision to cut marketing costs. Marc Pritchard, the company's global brand building and marketing officer, said it would look for "fewer, bigger creative ideas that can travel around the world."

Data sourced from Warc