How do you perform Social Media on a Digg Veteran

Glen Allsopp / 4 Comments / October 31st, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

Before I get into the more detailed stuff, I just want to say that a digg veteran is a client that has been on the Digg homepage over 40 times (4 in the last month), in my opinion anyway, which is a pretty impressive stat but it also means it’s difficult to show some large gains. So how do you go about increasing their amazing social leverage?

Firstly, I think we have to take a step back and have a look back at what Social Media Marketing involves, as Digg is certainly not just the be all and end all. Covered back in our post about “What is Social Media” and nicely in a video by ‘SMOgger‘, Social Media Marketing really includes:

Helping a site become more like a community (allowing comments, poll voting, user interaction)
Making a site more linkable (RSS to keep people updated, Social Bookmarking buttons, Being involved in the niche)
Being Unique (Great content, Know your Audience, Rewarding Users)
Getting Content out there (Social News, Social Discovery, Blogs, Forums)

Of course I could go into more detail but if you want to know more just check out the 2 links above. The site we originally took on was doing around 500k visitors per month, then with some simple SEO changes their search engine traffic started sky rocketing, throw in some link building and 1.3million visitors a month later we still hadn’t started with the Social side of things.

Getting Started Socially

1. When a site has been on the Digg homepage close to 50 times you know they must be producing great content. Even better when I see they have a category that just looks like every story was made to go viral (although it wasn’t), I just had to make sure the right people knew about it. Being close to a lot of top diggers and letting them know about the site, it was a pleasant surprise that they thanked me for the link and promised to keep checking on the content to submit things of interest.

2. I personally did not want to be submitting the content of the client, at least not a lot anyway and would prefer current website visitors to get in on the action aswell. To do that we suggested that the site developers make the social bookmarking links more prominent and remove a certain amount of clutter from the page in order for them to be a strong CTA (Call to Action).

3. It was pretty surprising to see that Digg was the only real avenue that the site was getting social traffic from, not that many links were coming from blog’s to each post that made the homepage either. We started submitting content from the site to the likes of Reddit and StumbleUpon and started to find content that was becoming pretty popular. From then it was a case of the people who already used those sites started checking out the RSS feed and submitting their own content.

Whats Next?

As just mentioned, the site doesn’t get a great deal of links despite the interesting content, we plan on increasing that by getting the client to link out to others more, make it easier for people to link to them (trackbacks, cleaner URL’s etc) and we have some other ideas up our sleeve.

Will certainly keep you posted!