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.

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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

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