How one Social Media Upset doesn’t Equal Failure

This post might sound like it’s all going to be about an example; well…it is, and it isn’t. I’m going to quickly show an example to back up this title but then have a look at some other thoughts to keep in mind based on the results.

OK so recently there was an article on CNN about How to Clean your Room in 19 Minutes, which is a pretty good title for ‘Social Bait’ and I wouldn’t be surprised if I seen it go popular on a few social sites.

When it was submitted to Digg, this happened:

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As you can see, this only received 1 Digg, if it was your content and your site I’m sure you would have expected a better result. Why do I think it only received one Digg?

• The user had no profile image, the story didn’t stand out from the thousands of other submissions
• The user had no digg friends so they did not have anyone to instantly see the link
• It’s possible that it was a duplicate submission at the time but it is the same URL as the following

This was then submitted to StumbleUpon more recently with the following result:

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Incase that doesn’t make any sense, it made it’s way onto the StumbleUpon Buzz page. This is the page that shows all the latest ‘hot’ content on the site as judged by it’s users. So why did it work well on SU?

• SU Content instantly gets shown to others, no mantter how many friends you have
• It was good content, which was seen by others so people gave it a thumbs up

Update: As I was writing this guess what I seen on the Digg Homepage:

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Now I could have updated this and just said that I hadn’t edited this post, but I’ll be honest. I think it’s even more interesting as it shows just because a story didn’t make it on Digg, if you can find reasons as to why, other than the story content, then it could be worth giving it another shot (add some characters to the URL).

What Can You Learn from this?

There’s lots of things that I think you can take from this:

• Make an Effort. If you are going to submit your own content to Digg then make your profile a bit more attractive and add some real friends
• Don’t Give Up. Just because you didn’t get much luck on one site it doesn’t mean your efforts will go completely to waste, especially if the content is good enough elsewhere.
• Look at Why it’s not working. By no means do our Social Media campaigns go smoothly first time, I would be worried with the web if they did because thing’s are just never that good. If something didn’t work then look at why but don’t get too hung up on it. Move on.

Upsets Schmupets

CNN probably wasn’t the greatest example, but I noticed it pretty recently so decided to use it. The thing is I doubt the team over at CNN even noticed they are getting all this SU traffic or that they were submitted to Digg and didn’t make the homepage, let alone worry about it.

If you are writing about sports then don’t just try Reddit / Digg / SU for traffic, check out niche sites like Ball Hype or relevant blogs. The web is your oyster.