For Social Media

Top Social Media Media Sites Should You Really Care About

I’m sure you already know that everyone and their mother is on Facebook right?  Facebook, that behemoth of a platform with 500 million users is number one.  If you want to have visibility online and engage in the platform that offers the best source of social media traffic to your website or blog you need to be on the number one social networking site in the world.

What about the number two player?  If you have a social networking campaign to launch or you want to engage and make “friends” so that you can eventually interest people in what you are doing online, where would you go after Facebook?  Well, it surprised me in writing this article that the answer is StumbleUpon.  StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site where people can “Stumble” web pages that peak their interest, write reviews, rate, and share their discoveries with their followers.  We should all care about StumbleUpon if we care about what social media is – making connections.  The Social Media Examiner wrote a nice little article on how to use StumbleUpon, so I won’t get into how I am using it until the end of this piece.

When TechCrunch first reported StumbleUpon’s #2 ranking in April, they had StatCounter‘s Global Stats graph from Mar 2009 to March 2010.  Well, I did another StatCounter graph from Nov 2009 to Nov 2010, and the results still show StumbleUpon as the number two most trafficked social media site.

<!– You may change the values of width and height above to resize the chart –>

We’re not talking members here, because StumbleUpon has roughly 11 million users versus 175 million Twitter users.  We are talking about level of importance if the results from StatCounter are correct, and we are going to assume they are, because TechCrunch is influential enough to have done their homework.  The conclusion is StumbleUpon is an important social media traffic generating platform for your blog and website.  Similar to Twitter’s ReTweet, as you stumble-upon more content and discover fascinating new information that has yet to be stumbled, you will gain new subscribers who will see a plethora of the stuff you found good enough to “Like”.  StumbleUpon requires you to do minimal self-promotion of you own site(s), and instead share information about new websites that you recommend.  Align the content, and relationships you’ve created on StumbleUpon, with your burgeoning “StumbleUpon Station” correctly and the potential rewards for mega traffic back to your own website is almost guaranteed.

Now for my take on how to use StumbleUpon.  If you really want to get your blogs and website to be eyeballed, get yourself StumbleUpons’s link shortener – su.pr simply by opening a free account. Copy and paste your Tweets in the box supplied with the original link to the article, hit the shorten link button, check the Twitter and/or Facebook check-boxes and then click on “post” or schedule the post, and you are finished.

Your article will be posted by using su.pr shortening service to your Twitter and  Facebook accounts.  You can then click on the article snapshot and “vote it up”.  After you have done this, simply go to your StumbleUpon profile and share the article with your other subscribers and if you are fortunate, they will also vote it up as well.  Alternately, if you don’t mind your screen real-estate being infringed upon, you can certainly download the StumbleUpon Firefox add-on and the website will be available in the toolbar of your browser.  The pay back for the browser add-on is it appears StumbleUpon gives more credence to the content you’re sharing when you do your stumbling and liking through the frame, because you are now fully part of the community.

Having been on StumbleUpon for a couple of years and having hardly had a go at it, I are now armed and ready to really use it in a manner that clearly works for a large majority of its subscribers.

About the Author

Social Media Junkie is A Social Media Strategist for RED Brand Media.

Social Media Revolution 2011

(Jean Michel) Moreau le Photo Mugs (Jean Michel) Moreau le Jeune s drawing La vie dun petit maitre – La Loge Op. The mores and customs of Paris at the time of Louis XVI, 1782. A man is greeting a woman in an opera box. French painter, draftsman, printmaker, 1741 – 1814…..

130 Evicted/slum/1891 Photo Mugs 130 poor Irish folk evicted from filthy, unwholesome and overcrowded premises in Leather Lane, Holborn, London, on a cold winters night ….

16Thc Drawing Room Scene Photo Mugs A noblewoman works at her embroidery while her daughter winds the silk thread, in the drawing room at Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire ….

Caveman $0.79 Yes, that’s a former Beatle in caveman costume for this more-dumb-than-funny 1981 comedy about a prehistoric misfit (Ringo Starr) who recruits other misfits to start a new tribe. The jokes about flatulence and sex are banal, but the cast of then-unfamiliar faces is fun to watch from the perspective of history. The best thing going are some dinosaur special effects, though Ringo might argue meeting…

Miss Evers’ Boys $2.77 Laurence Fishburne helped shepherd this Emmy Award-winning exposé from American medical history books to the small screen. Anchored in the 1973 Senate inquiry into the infamous Tuskegee Study, the film uses a flashback structure to take us back 40 years as Nurse Eunice Evers (played with honest conviction by Alfre Woodard, who also earned an acting Emmy for her powerful performance) describes how…

Buena Vista Social Club $10.56 Ry Cooder’s name has helped bring attention to this session, but it’s the veteran Cuban son musicians who make this album really special. Reminiscent of Ellington in its scope and sense of hushed romanticism, Buena Vista Social Club is that rare meld of quietude and intensity; while the players sound laid-back, they’re putting forth very alive music, a reminder that aging doesn’t mean taking to be…

Bridge to Terabithia [Blu-ray] $5.98 BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA – Blu-Ray Movie…

Dancetime! 500 Years of Social Dance Vol I : 15th-19th Centuries [VHS] $13.93 DanceTime! is a journey through 500 years of social dancing, traveling from court to country, ballroom to bistro, salon to street. The choreography of each dance is the result of extensive research and is staged with period music and costumes. Volume I/ The 15th to 19th Centuries Dance through history with the revelry of the Renaissance, the elegance of the Baroque, the charm of Regency country da…

No Apologies: The Truth About Life, Love & Sex [VHS] $3.99 Value priced! Video from Focus on the Family that will bring balance to the issue of teen sexuality by promoting self-respect, responsibility, marital fidelity, virtue, and self-control. A great companion to the book. 30 minutes…

On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City $24.59 Energizing the visual landscape since 1968, New York City’s community murals beautify, educate, protest, celebrate, and often motivate residents to action. Collaborations between artists and neighborhood groups, these painted walls reflect the social, cultural, and political climate of their times. The result of six years of research and hundreds of interviews, On the Wall brings to light murals t…