Some Tips:
- Use Great Headlines
- Submit at the Best Time
- Focus Your Marketing Campaigns
At SEOmoz, our annual top referrers are direct access, search engines, and the social media websites, Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com. We receive massive traffic from direct access and search engines by creating unique quality content on a daily basis and providing useful tools to attract return visitors. These techniques are our safe bet. They send us steady traffic every day. Sometimes, however, we like to roll the dice.
The Grand Prize
Digg.com is the massively popular social ‘news’ website. It gets an unholy amount of press and produces fierce competition to get to its homepage. The lucky ones who do get to the homepage receive between 50 and 100 thousand visits in a two day period.
Daily Unique Visitors Highlighting When a Story Got On the Digg Homepage
This phenomenon has led many social media marketers to spend the majority of their time trying to get their content on Digg.
The Gamble
Last week Jane and the development crew launched the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards. Most of the SEOmoz team (myself included) then started working on a social media marketing campaign to promote our new article.
As soon as the article was submitted to Digg I started tracking the submission’s Diggs and the amount of referrers from Digg.com on a minute by minute basis.
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I then compared this to the referrers we were getting from StumbleUpon for the same article.
For a broader perspective, I tracked the view statistics from three other successful SEOmoz articles that had been submitted to both StumbleUpon and Digg.
Case studies
- The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet
- Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains
- 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should)
- 2008 Web 2.0 Awards
All of this data has led me to believe that StumbleUpon is really the better bet for the focus of my social media campaigns. Over time StumbleUpon simply yields better results than Digg. This is not to say that submitting to Digg is worthless. I think new marketers should always put in some effort to ensure that their viral content gets submitted to Digg with the appropriate meta data. However, unless they have access to a Digg power account, I think their (and my) marketing efforts are better spent elsewhere. My data tells me that my efforts at social marketing are much better spent trying to get stumbles.
Overall Referrers for 2007
I think more analysis is needed:
1/ How's users behavior different?
2/ How's users demographics different?
3/ What's better for linkbait?
4/ What time of content is more likely to be a success at both palces?
But at general I agree:
1/ SU is easier to get noticed (so for the less time spent on marketing, you get more effectiveness);
2/ SU is not as limited in topics (anything can be successful there if submitted to the right category);
3/ SU is more targeted (again, if wisely submitted).
Still, SU has some disadvantages too:
1/ SU members read, comment but do not as actively link as Digg users (with me at leats);
2/ Some SU categories are inactive: with SEO you most often have to submit to "Search" but submissions from that category almost never go hot as too few people are interested in it (compared to other categories at least): yes, you will reach some interested people but won't achieve a boom.
3/ SU algorithm is a miracle: most often by looking at the reviews' page, you are unable to teel how much traffic the post got...
i agree. i'd like to see more analysis on Ann's 4 points above, especially the behavior and demographics.
can we expect a follow up, danny? please.
Good post, thank you. I have also had much better luck with StumbleUpon than digg. I don't have a powerful digg account or access to one, so my opinion is certainly biased.
I routinely receive 50k+ stumbles on stories (or pictures), but have never seen more than a few hundred from Digg. I strikes me that Digg's audience has a narrower range of interests than SU's, and thus a larger potential for a lot of interest.
Here's some other reasons I like SU better for promotion:
1) SU doesn't have a time limit for an item going viral. I've submitted content and had it blow up a month later.
2) SU has an ungameable method for determining a stories value: they can send a Stumbler of their choice to the site and gauge their reactions. Your friends can get a story going, but its the random Stumblers that have to make it big. Consequently, good content has a better chance of success based on merit.
3) A great headline or description isn't as big of a deal on SU, and certainly won't make or break a story. It can bring you traffic from readers of your SU blog, but they are negligible.
4) SU doesn't kill your server. They can control how many people they are sending to the site at once, and rarely seem to send more than a couple hundred a minute.
SU is consistently undervalued as a source of promotion, IMHO.
As an aside, I've been meaning to start a blog on SU optimization for some time and am torn between 2 domains: stumbleseo.com and stumbleuponseo.com. I like the latter better, but the former has less trademark infringement worries. Any advice here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks again Danny.
i'd say go stumbleseo.com not only for trademark worries, but if you want to branch out beyond stumble upon you could without it seeming odd or dated. ;)
Thanks SEO Hack. I think I will use stumbleseo. Good point about branching out, I hadn't considered that.
This isn't surprising. Digg is like a sprint race, while StumbleUpon is more like a marathon. With Digg you get a large influx of traffic right off the bat (pending the story hits the homepage), whereas you get less with StumbleUpon but it's more long lasting (content never "moves off the homepage," so you can continue to receive steady traffic long after the piece was submitted).
A good social media marketer knows not to put all his eggs in one basket. The best practice is to simply try and leverage multiple angles at once (submit to Digg, SU, reddit, appropriate forums, contact bloggers, etc) for the highest possible overall success rate.
gawd, another running anology? sheesh! ;)
i hope some people read that and took it to heart.
Okay, fine.
Digg is like a one of those Hollywood Weight Loss juice diets where you lose like 5-10 lbs in a couple days, while StumbleUpon is like consistent diet and exercise for a year, resulting in like an 80 lb weight loss.
Or:
Digg is like a timed hot dog eating contest, but with StumbleUpon you could eat more hot dogs over a longer period of time, with no enforced time limit.
now that last one is one i can totally get into! i mean, yeah, that little guy might be able to pack 58 hotdogs in a minute, but what can he do in an hour? i could eat all my hotdogs, his hotdogs and then eat him (assuming he didn't have any saurkraut on him) in an hour.
anyways, yeah, totally. ;)
added - for the record, i'm not a cannibal. really.
And Rebecca does know a thing or two about sprint racing and marathon ;)
Danny, I think this is a great post, but I question how you can come away with a conclusion for where to focus your Social Media campaigns without evaluating the quality of traffic as well. If you're just trying to get pageviews, then StumbleUpon is the way to go.
I can't get over the idea that SU users are just clicking a button and randomly appear on your site. At least Digg users see a title and think they might be interested. Those are just my feelings though. They're not backed up by data.
Willy,
Great comment, let me clarify. The point I am trying to make in this post is that I think StumbleUpon is a much easier social media site to target than Digg for beginner SEOs.
Regarding the type of traffic. In my experience, StumbleUpon (SU) users have more web presence than Digg users. This is evidenced by the amount of links I receive when something goes popular on SU and by the fact that SEO themed topics generally do better on SU.
My views in the post are merely trends I have seen in the data I have analyzed. They are by no means definitive fact.
Thanks for the input. ;-)
Danny, thanks for your conlusions in the post. I am wondering what is the comparison of traffic quality when you add Sphinn to this analysis. For many industries niche social media is much more valuable...
You could think about that differently though. Stumble Upon users are in browse mode. I don't know if you use it or not, but I find that it's a nice way to pass the time and discover new sites. You do filter the results to topics you are interested in and most of the time it's pretty well targetted. You probably are getting a lot of people who are interested in your topic.
Digg users seem to just want to get the news, in the shortest form possible (often not bothering to read the article), and get out. Hasn't SEOmoz posted some things in the past about how transient Digg traffic is?
It would be good to see some time on site stats for Stumble Upon vs. Digg. If people using StumbelUpon are in browse mode, they might send a bit more time on the site, look at other articles and maybe subscribing to the feed. I get the impression that Digg users don't stick around long enough to read past the headline.
Yes I agree, even on my site I have more visitors coming to me while stumbling than digging. But easier said than done, Digg is getting impossible day by day. Unlike Stumble Digg is 'do or die / one night stand' with communities dominanting most stories..
Danny, i don't wanna sound negative or anything but you doesn't prove anything with that except that you've received more traffic from SU than Digg. Like WillyF pointed out, you didn't evaluate the quality of the traffic. Another good point that missing out his the time spent pushing the articles to each platforms. So without putting the right numbers in the equation, you cannot say that yout time is better spent pushing your stuff on SU than Digg. Also, you may have a power SU account that make it more easy for you to get traffic from SU than from Digg. And sorry for the poor grammar I'm one of those crazy french canadians SEO ;)
granted this is purely anecdotal, and i don't have any access to a digg power user, but from what i've seen not only is SU easier to get noticed on, with my puny account (and others who i know stumble my stuff and don't have any sway), i tend to get traffic from SU for stuff stumbled months ago.
plus, with numbers like those, you have to figure some people are stopping and reading and not just hitting a button and moving on. i mean, you figure if only 1% of SU users are actually stopping and reading -vs- 5% of digg users, unless all of a sudden SEOmoz becomes a digg darling, the numbers are surely in SU's favor.
Question for you: since digg and stumbleupon represent your 4&5th referrers, why don't you have icons at the end of each blog post for these services to allow rapid bookmarking?
CNN must added a MIXX icon to their news articles.
Just Dugg it :)
https://digg.com/tech_news/StumbleUpon_better_than_Digg_for_SMO
Good post, and great data. Although I think most sites have specific personalities that are unique to each site.
Maybe this is a bit of a stretch but myspace, facebook, linkedin all have different agendas and personalities to accomplish those agendas. I think sites like propeller, digg, stumble have differences based on the nature of the audience.
This is definitely one of the most informative posts about social media I have read. All this great information and diagrams really gave me new knowledge about this topic that I never knew before. The way you write on this blog really makes the reader interested in any topic. I really enjoy reading your work and I look forward for more great posts to come.
Great to hear! You can look forward to many more posts in the future and I look forward to reading your comments.
Danny,
Great post! It was very informative and the research that you do always has great value to anything I do in SEO.
You have given me added desire to focus more of my efforts on SU. Thanks for the research.
"....by the fact that SEO themed topics generally do better on SU"
This is something that striked my mind at the first place. It is equally possible that Stumbles and Diggers may vary in their choices.
The comparison is, however, remarkable.
This is the conclusion that our firm has come to not having access to a power digg account. Based on the budget/resources you just have to make due. Part of the fun of the biz.
Second (catch me attention from the rss feed) post in couple weeks Danny. Awesome!
this is probably one of the better posts about SMM I've read for some time. Thank god for someone pointing out that maybe, *just maybe*, friggin' Digg isn't the end-all be-all for getting traffic. Especially if you don't have friends with power accounts.
by any chance you planning on doing something similar with reddit?
again, well-done. =)
Danny, thanks for another top drawer post. You really know how to summarise the research you've been doing, and then take it that step further and add value to it.
By the way, what DO you use to create those lovely graphs?
Thumbs up!
this really shed some light on stumble for me. I've been playing with for a while now for my social media campaigns. I've started to notice that searching for backlinks via stumble is a lot faster and less time consuming , but you always have to watch out for no-follow's. if not the time you spent is just wasted. On an average of 50 blog sites a day i get about 10 solid links from it. Way to many no -follow sites that dont take to kindly to anchor text or as they call it "spam". :(
i think stumbleupon appeals to the general public/regular users more and digg appeals to the online geeks (no offense to anyone - i consider myself a geek).
so for me that totally means targeting SU over digg for most all my clients. the opposite would likely be true for a more tech oriented site. the exception being SEO, as we all know SEO doesn't go over too well on digg. i would think the seomoz articles would therefore almost automatically appeal more to the SU audience.
so, it'd be interesting to see an analysis on a site that somehow blurs the line between the two and appeals to both audiences.
side note: my office building elevators have one of those little tv like screens that show news tidbits and stuff. yesterday i saw one that was a blurb about stumbleupon. crazy, i thought. maybe it's about to get even more mainstream.
Creating content for social media can give a massive traffic for a site if you post quality and unique content that can bring a thousand of visit. I have been using Social Media like Digg and Stumbleupon for so long and as the result it is not quite good. It is importat that we post article that will attract potential reader.
Nice collection of stats, Danny. For the Rod Tidwells of the world, did you conduct any analysis regarding conversions made by visitors driven to the site by the social posts (signed up to be PRO members for instance)?
Some marketers may be interested in what social sites host more frugal browsers like Castanza who would opt for lethal wedding invitations or more spendthrifts like Jerry who will take his parents out to dinner at a reasonable time after the 'early bird' special.
"I love you gambler!"