IM has had a considerable amount of success using social media to promote content. The top traffic drivers in recent months have been consistent:
- Google/Search (by far)
- Direct Traffic (clearly 2nd)
- Facebook (far above #5 on)
- StumbleUpon (far above #5 on)
- Yahoo! Buzz
Without immediately diving into the specifics of how to effectively use each, here are some general rules of thumb for using social media:
- The Submitter is Key – Everything depends on the profile of the person submitting your post. This means that if you haven’t invested the time in developing a profile for the site in question, you can actually hurt the pageview potential of your post by submitting it yourself.
- Titles are Key – Titles can be altered for social media sites to make the submission as effective as possible.
- Spamming is Punished – The algorithm for each social media site learns quickly, and will negatively weight a submitters profile if s/he only submits from a single site. This means that to use social media effectively, you must submit non-IM-related content!
- Each Social Media Site is Different – Each site favors a particular type of content. It’s imperative that you know what type of content is appropriate for each.
- Timing is Key - both Digg and Reddit have a time-window in which a post can go “popular”. If you miss the window you will not get traffic. Certain days (Sunday) and certain times of day (morning) always do better.
- Thresholds are Key – All social media sites have a certain voting threshold that, once reached, push a story onto the front page and cause a traffic spike. This is really important to understand in conjunction with Why Metrics Matter.
Editorial Guidelines for Social Media:
- For all social media sites, make sure to submit stories from other, non-IM sources in a 3:1 (non-IM:IM) ratio. If this doesn’t make sense, ask your editor about it.
- Do not spam! Submitting from only one or even a handful of sites puts the entire network at risk for accusations of spamming.
- Don’t submit anything to Digg.com until you have a solid grasp of the intricacies of this network.
A Brief Introduction to the Biggest Social Media Sites
Digg.com:
The most infamous of all social media sites. Digg requires a considerable time investment to use effectively as an individual, but the real power lies in leveraging a community of users. Generally speaking, Digg tends to favor stories of a sensational nature.
To get started, see How to Create a Blog That People Really Digg, the Top 8 Rules of Using Digg and How to Use Digg Like a Pro.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon requires the installation of a relatively unobtrusive toolbar. What may appear to be a major time-waster at first (like many things) can actually be an incredibly useful tool for finding things potentially invisible to normal search traffic. Choosing a category and hitting “Stumble!” will take you to a random website, which is determined by the number of votes that page has gotten and the relative weight of each.
It’s important to get your posts submitted to StumbleUpon, or to start building a profile and submit them yourself. A great deal about SU can be found here: The Definitive StumbleUpon Resource List
SU favors visually compelling content. Hooking readers immediately is especially important here.
Reddit is the easiest to submit to but can be difficult to crack. The trick is to submit to the appropriate subcategory (Environment, Science, Technology, World News, Politics, Business are some of the largest) which you have to have added to your profile. You also have to become fairly proficient at writing good titles to make it on Reddit, since that’s all you get.
The Reddit crowd is generally more critical and scientific and tends to favor stories with substance. Reddit users also tend to punish obvious re-posts of content.
Take a minute to look over the front page of Reddit. What seems to be doing well there?
Yahoo! Buzz
Yahoo! Buzz is relatively new on the social media scene, but is compelling for several reasons. First, it gives you an access point to get picked up on Yahoo.com—which is basically the Gold Medal of web publishing—and second, it’s accessible to all kinds of stories, including the oft-neglected-by-social-media family & lifestyle stories.
If you’re paying attention to hot topics you can do very well on Buzz. For more information, see the forum post on how to effectively use Yahoo! Buzz.
Update: Yahoo!Buzz is supposedly going to be killed soon. Until then, it still seems to be a good & extremely easy way to drive traffic to our sites.
Other Social Media Sites
If you’re wondering why your favorite site isn’t listed here, such as Delicious, Care2, Mixx, MindBodyGreen, Propeller, NowPublic, etc., it’s because all of these have consistently been poor traffic performers, or we just haven’t figured out how to use them well. It just doesn’t make sense to submit your posts to 15 different sites if you only get 50 pageviews out of it.
That doesn’t mean things won’t change though. Mixx has been growing in popularity for some time, Tip’d is just starting, and we’ve never adequately tested out the potential of Delicious.
You can also promote our blogs and your posts through being an active member of social networks. Besides giants such as Facebook and Twitter, there are several smaller niche sites where you can gain exposure and readers.
How to Start Building Social Media Profiles
The best thing you can do to start building a profile on each of these sites is to start to contribute! Set a goal of finding 3 great stories per day that you can submit to each site. Once you start to get a feel for things, start to make one of those stories a post from IM (except for digg – wait until you know what you’re doing).
How to Be Smarter than an Algorithm
If you really want to master social media, you have to learn how to see patterns in what works and what doesn’t. The simplest way to do this is to spend time on the front page of each of these sites, and the actually use them as a normal user would. Spending 30 minutes a day submitting non-IM stories will pay off, and it’s also an editorial requirement if you’re submitting your own IM posts.
The second thing you must do is read and experiment. If one thing doesn’t work, try something else. There is an incredible amount of information available online to help you get started, and we’ll be adding more here.