BABB-6: Social Media Networking
Day 6 of the Be A Better Blogger series:
Day 6. Start making friends on a social media service like Digg or StumbleUpon. These services are a great place to network, because you’ll be establishing relationships with people who have the potential to send hundreds of visitors to your articles. If you vote up their content, you may be able to call in a favor later on by asking them to vote up your posts…
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This is an interesting concept… and probably not one I would have thought of on my own. When looking at Social Media, which simply means collaborative and interactive media, I am generally considering optimization – or ways that I can optimize my content to take advantage of social media services. This is called SMO, short for Social Media Optimization.
Social Networking is a term I associate with networking on interactive sites such as blogs, forums and social Q&A sites (Askville, Yahoo! Answers, MyLot, etc). More often than not this means contributing to the content with resources, responses and/or opinions. Its a great way to network, gain exposure and get relevant inbound links.
Both are great methods for online promotion, but I honestly hadnt considered a combination of the two: “social media networking” – our task for the day.
I am going to start with StumbleUpon, since this is the site I am most familiar with and already get the most results from. I believe I have an account there already, but I will have to dig up logins – I have not used the site to speak of, but do enjoy the results of my content being ’stumbled’ there freqently.
This is the URL on StumbleUpon where my blog was originally discovered there: http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/clicknewz.com. You might try plugging your domain into that URL (in place of clicknewz.com at the end) to see if your own blog has been ‘discovered’ yet.
Obvious first steps are to locate logins (or create an account), set up a profile (or update existing profile), and then start creating a friends list. I’ll begin on the page where my own blog was discovered and reviewed, adding the ’stumblers’ who are already familiar with my blog.
From there you can view the Top Stumblers on the community page, or click the People Tab at the top of the page to see who is currently online.
Those 3 sections of the site (your blog’s review page, the top stumblers, and the people who are currently online) should make for a great start to building an active friends list on SU.
I just set myself up on StumbleUpon and it took less than 2 minutes. Apparently I didnt have an account there afterall. You can see my page here: http://lynnterry.stumbleupon.com/public/ . I’m off to start with step one (my profile) and go from there. In the meantime, I found this great article while browsing SU:
Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites
That will give us all a good start on other Social Media sites once we are set up and using StumbleUpon and ready to move on to the next one…
Best,
Tags: social media, social networking, social marketing, digg, stumble upon
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Hi Lynn,
StumbleUpon is the best social media site out there. It does not send as much traffic as Digg but the traffic is long lasting. But, it requires participation. You have to be an active user to get the real benefits.
My blog is very new. The structure is not even totally complete. I received 30K unique hits from StumbleUpon. Not bad.
I have put together a resource article containging about 70 articles by some of the most well known social media marketers. They are organized into topic areas for easy use.
Your Ultimate StumbleUpon Resource
There is a heavy learning curve when it comes to StumbleUpon. Read these articles and I can guarantee you will know how to successfully participate in StumbleUpon.
Success at StumbleUpon is all about building a broad network of friends.
Add me as a friend at StumbleUpon and I will be happy to reciprocate.
That is an open invitation.
beaufla.stumbleupon.com
Great, and thank you so much for the details and for the link – I’m off to check that out
Follow me @lynnterry on Twitter.
I’m trying to become more “social.” Initially I felt like the the social media sites were more “kid” oriented (MySpace comes to mind). But there are more business oriented services around now and I’m exploring. I just updated my blog theme and added some social tools at the same time.
[...] just yesterday a reader left a comment here at ClickNewz leaving a link to one of his own resource lists – relevant to the post, of [...]
Great, Linda! There are definitely lots of social media services to look into, and more and more keep popping up. I think I am going to start with StumbleUpon and master that – then perhaps move on to Twitter.
FlickR is another great social media site, specifically for photos, that can be very useful from what I hear.
Follow me @lynnterry on Twitter.
I must agree with you Lynn on this one. Social Media Networking plays a great role in blogging, especially when it comes to getting visitors to your own blog.