How to Get Traffic from the top Social Media Sites
Glen Allsopp / 
25 Comments / 
June 12th, 2008 / 
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With so much great information out there, I wanted to provide a resource that allows people to understand how certain social media sites work and what are the best ways are to leverage their traffic.
With that in mind, I’ve put together this list of only the best articles which cover marketing on Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Digg.
Delicious
10 Tips for Making Your Blog posts More Delicious - Vandelay Design
Four Effective Ways to Get Listed on Delicious Popular Pages - Dosh dosh
Delicious Popular Page posts Analyzed - Problogger
Making Your Content Delicious - PronetAdvertising
Tips Summary
Use Great Titles - Although this is common on most social sites, Delicious doesn’t show off a descriptions field so you can only see the titles of articles
Use Lists - A lot of the tips on doing well on Delicious mention this (and a lot of the homepage content includes this). People love lists to look through i.e. resources
Digg
How to Make the Digg Homepage - Copybrighter
Categories that Make the Digg Homepage the Most - Center Networks
5 Ways to Make the Digg Front page - Pronet Advertising
10 Actionable Tips that Make me a Digg Top User - Marketallica
12 Must-Have Tools for Active Digg Users - Doshdosh
Tips Summary
Be Involved - One of the best ways to succeed on Digg is to really get involved. Create a natural profile and digg the content that you like (and lots of it).
Use Some Tools - There are some great tools that makes it much easier to become a Digg power user, it just takes time and patience in conjunction with these to start noticing some results
24 Ways to Market Your Brand Inside Facebook - Inside Facebook
100 Tools and Tips to Tap into Facebook - Inside CRM
Tips to Marketing on Facebook - Marketing Pilgrim
A Successful Facebook Marketing Campaign - Social Media Optimisation
Tips Summary
Make Use of Pages - Pages were created so that businesses and the like can promote whatever they have to offer. Pages allow people to become a ‘fan’ of you and get you even more exposure so take advantage of this
Get Involved in Groups - Get involved in the groups of your target audience. If there aren’t any already then create one and help spread the word through your connections. This will deem you an authority on that topic
MySpace
MySpace Marketing and Why It’s Worth Your Time - Small Business Branding
Understand MySpace before Marketing in MySpace - Stephen Spencer
Getting to Know MySpace - Wolfhowl
Tips Summary
Look Around - Really get to know all the options available in MySpace before you start comment spamming. Messaging can be a good option and there are also paid advertising spots.
Target a Niche - If you are going down a ’spammy route’, don’t just try to target the whole of MySpace. Look into people in niches for example women or members of certain groups.
StumbleUpon
A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon - Dosh dosh
How to Increase StumbleUpon traffic - SEOptimise
StumbleUpon Guide: Driving Traffic to Websites - Shaun Low
Internet Marketers Guide to StumbleUpon - ViperChill
Tips Summary
Look at the Features - There is a lot more to StumbleUpon traffic than meets the eye. For example, the ‘Send to’ feature can be very useful in getting more votes on a particular story of yours.
Paid Advertising - I’m very familiar with their paid advertising option now and love the service. Although it takes a while to approve you can get specific visitors for only $0.05 a hit.
18 Super Useful Ways to Use Twitter - Cowley On
How to Get People to Click on Your Twitter Links - Mass Media
5 Reasons Twitter is an Essential Social Media Tool - Search Engine Guide
35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users - Problogger
Tips Summary
Be Real - Bots are pretty much useless in that twitter users are mostly web-savvy enough to know what is going on. Even if someone does click on an automated link they probably wont last there very long.
Connect - Instead of just posting your own updates, really connect and get involved with what others are up too. Sending people messages directly are another great way to get in touch with them on a personal level.
In Summary
There are many more resources out there for marketing to each of these sites but I really did only want to include the best information. You can find pretty much everything you need to know in the resources above and succeed in driving traffic to your website from them.
I thought it would be a good idea to include little summaries of each so that this isn’t the typical ‘link-out’ post that we are all used too. What are you waiting for? Get learning!
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Greetings mate,
First visit, I was referred here by a friend and I am glad I did. Definitely will be a lifetime visitor. Congrats on the feed (500) subscribers. I can see why people keep on coming back. Great post by the way, very resourceful and informative, i can imagine the research it took.
If I may add a an extra service that should prove worthy to many, LinkedIn.com, i think by connecting right with that service and using its features it can return with tons of new contacts and interests which will expose blogger/service providers to more audience.
Cheers for the suggestion Nash, I’m glad you enjoy the content here, your thoughts are appreciated.
If I do a part II on this post which is possible then I’ll definitely include LinkedIn, thanks for the suggestion.
You missed Plurk
To be honest I’m not a huge fan of Plurk, as I don’t really use the service. I don’t think theres that much info out there on leveraging it’s traffic right now?
Theres a lot of other sites that could have been included but I really wanted to focus on the biggest:
- Flickr
- Mixx
- Reddit
etc all could have been included, I might do a part II to this
Comprehensive post. But I have to read all the links when I have lot of time at hand.
haha Yeah joel, it might take a while to go through them all. One of the reasons I only picked my favourite links rather than just tons of mediocre posts.
Hey, great resource… Thank you. I actually hit my first StumbleUpon payload… which was about 350 hits off of 1 article. For a 3 month old blog, I thought that was pretty good in general.
While the quantity was great, the quality wasn’t there… I got a good review or 2, so I think it hit its mark, but I go no increase in subscribers and no return traffic, plus the bounce rate was extremely high…
This leads me to believe the effort to get there was 1) not worth it, and 2) did not hit my target market…
Thoughts?
Hey Ken, I’ve actually seen something similar recently. I can get 80,000 StumbleUpon visitors in a month, no problem…but the bounce rate is over 70%. I remember about a year ago this was commonly around 30% which was fantastic.
I think that the userbase has grown so large and there are so many people trying to become ‘top users’ that they just land on sites and keep on going, rather than reading what they have to offer.
That’s definitely not the same for the whole audience though, there are still a lot of quality visitors to be found.
Glen, thank you for your words of wisdom… That is great to know.
My remaining concern is that the base I’m primarily going after is not as hooked into social media sites. I am finding some very good counterparts in this realm, and it is meeting my overall goal of creating a conversation with interesting people.
I am overall fairly frustrated with the ROI for the amount of time I’m dumping in to the social media sites - mainly b/c I do not have a large fan/follower base there I believe. I feel this is distracting from the quality of content, so I am investigating other alternatives.
I have yet to “crack the nut” but it is definitely an interesting journey and I am learning so much from a wonderful community like those following PB…
Again, thank you…
No problem Ken, one thing I like to think is that I’m always willing to help people out even if others can’t see it (comments / email / IM) just because I’ve had help along my journey.
The one reason that social media works well for sites in the marketing industry is that so many marketers use the site. i.e. if you are in a niche where there is a limited number of people on stumbleupon then they must be hanging out elsewhere:
- Facebook Groups
- Mixx
- Forums
That kind of thing. Try and connect to people in your niche via stumbleupon before promoting to just anyone if you haven’t tried that option.
Good luck
… which is how I found your blog, incidentally
A perfect use from links. And great detail, to spend time to made summaries.
It’s a fact that social media change paradigm that we use internet. And serius marketer users need improvement their strategies to follow up.
Thanks,
Another social marketing strategy is to use social bookmarking sites to create backlinks to your site.
I have found 15 sites so far that Google will follow back to your site and return a backlink in Google results.
However, think about this: If Digg has 5 million users and the average number of posts, from the Digg top 100 to the user who no longer participates is 1 post per day, that is 5 million posts.
How can you possibly expect that Google will see your 1 link in Digg in 5 million others as a backlink to your site. In fact if you submit your site to Digg and no one else Diggs it, I have come to feel that is a negative indicator in Google’s eyes. The worst thing you can do is submit your Digg posts yourself and then get no Diggs.
One of my friends on Social Marketing Central wrote an article that went hot on the Internet. He got like 1500 visitors in a few days and 80 comments. The bad news is that he only got 18 Diggs. Now tell me this: Don’t you think that Google, that has access to the popularity of posts on Digg just like we do, would not see 1500 visitors and 18 Diggs a negative indicator of this blog and the blog post itself?
I can easily get 100 to 200 Diggs for any article I want in Digg in 2 days. I do that through my own strategies and participation.
So social bookmarking if done wrong can actually hurt you. Social marketing is about being social, so be social on social bookmarking sites, don’t just submit you own content and expect that this will bring you results.
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Waw, this entry is wonderful, it’s full of great tips, thanks for sharing.
I recommended it on StumbleUpon, you really deserved it
Greetings from Italy, ciao,
Desi
http://theitalianvoice.today.com
i generally prefering digg…
Fantastic research at putting such an informative list together for us to get traffic from topo social media sites.
Thanks to Desi who gave you a stumble which I found & also gave you a stumble.
[...] you try to leverage any community, you really have to understand the ways in which they work to get the most out of them. Fark [...]
Nice article, and a ton of useful info…
Nothing about LinkedIn though?
Thinking back, LinkedIn was probably the first social networking site that I participated in. I’ve made some great connections over the years, and think it’s one of the better sites for social networking in a professional environment.
Cheers!
-Jeff
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Very nice article! Thanks for this!
doumo_arigatou
Wow, great resource Glen! I’ve been wondering about this. Now the only question I have is WHEN do bloggers find time to do all this promotion? Blogging itself is time consuming when done right, and it’s just a small part of my entire operation. Know any way to farm some of this out?
be well
Rick
Sure Dr.K just start with one website which you enjoy using the most and then spend time building up a profile and your network there (I usually recommend StumbleUpon).
Then, you can move on to other sites as you’ll no longer need to spend as much time in StumbleUpon to have success when you promote your own content.
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