At one time, ‘hip’ humans learned to shake, rattle and roll; now we learn to tweet, stumble and ping our way through life. That’s because if you want to have a successful blog or website in today’s internet, you absolutely must leverage Social Media to bring more readers to your site. You’ve got to tweet, stumble and ping!
Since we started Life As A Human, every night at midnight EST, Chris, Kerry and I meet up in a Skype session to ensure that the latest posts are launching properly. We check the thumbnails, the feature box and ensure that things are linking properly. The system is now running automated tasks very well but we really wanted to be sure that everything was running smoothly.
Once the articles are published, we use a variety of Social Media mechanisms to spread the word. While there are many, I want to talk about three in particular: Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon. By an enormous margin, StumbleUpon is the most effective at driving traffic to the articles. Why is that?
First of all, for those of you not familiar with Social Media tools, here is a brief description of each one, as provided by Wikipedia. Part of the answer to why StumbleUpon is so effective is found in its description, which reveals a significant differentiation to Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.
Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and school or college.
StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles … StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests.
Note: StumbleUpon is a personalized recommendation engine … that’s the differentiator!
Now, I am not about to share our entire Social Media marketing strategy with everyone, but in a nutshell, the “tip” of it is this:
- To use Twitter, we log into our accounts, find the Life As A Human posts and ‘re-tweet’ them to our followers.
- To use Facebook, we log into our accounts and make a post there for each article.
- To use StumbleUpon, we surf to the bottom of the article at lifeasahuman.com, click on “share”, StumbleUpon, give it a thumbs-up and enter the tags (categories) that the article fits in.
While none of these three steps is difficult, it takes much less time to stumble than it does to re-tweet or post something at Facebook. Within minutes of our articles posting, we have seen 200 – 300 referrals from StumbleUpon versus two or three from Twitter and Facebook.
In fact, here are some numbers that will surprise a great many of you. Since launching on February 1, we have had many tens of thousands of referrals. Of those referrals …
StumbleUpon represents – 73%
Facebook represents – 6%
Twitter represents – 4.50%
It is also interesting to note that, collectively, we have thousands of followers and friends in Twitter and Facebook but very few in StumbleUpon. If you were to do an ROI (Return On Investment) calculation for time spent to referrals gained, the StumbleUpon number would be … well … enormous!
The Other Side of the Story
There are two sides to everything and StumbleUpon is no exception to that rule. While it drives a ton of referrals, you must be sure to properly ‘tag’ the thumbs-ups. If you don’t get that right, stumblers will pass right by your web site. So you get a page view, but they didn’t stay long and so your ‘visit duration’ (Average Time on Site) statistics will suffer. If you want to stumble a Life As A Human post (of course we wouldn’t mind that at all!), be sure to add ‘weblogs’ to the tags.
Conversely, readers who are referred to you from Twitter or Facebook are more likely to read the article in full and hopefully re-tweet it. Moreover, because of their ‘social networking’ natures, they present a much better way to create a buzz for you in the long run. Excitement is always a good thing! Also, for all you Twitter and Facebook fans out there, this is by no means a knock on either of them. I am simply presenting facts about their traffic driving capabilities, not their usefulness as tools to build and maintain relationships. That’s where they really shine!
So what does all of this have to do with your life as a human? Probably not that much, but many of you are bloggers and hopefully this will give you ideas on how to better leverage some very powerful mechanisms to bring more readers to your sites.
Read Part 2: Tweet, Stumble and Ping: A Follow Up
Photo Credits
Thumb Up Thumbnail –richkidsunite– Creative Commons
Recent Gil Namur Articles:
- Look After the Little Things
- Promenade
- Close Encounters Of The Google Kind
- Always In This Heart
- A Dance of Delight
Gil,
I’ve been using some of these methods with SU and have had great success. I don’t understand why you can’t get similar traffic from Facebook? Maybe FB needs to look at the success of SU and do the same? Again, great article I thumb up your article.
Thanks Lyle! 🙂
I LOVE thumbs ups!
FB is a very different animal. Remember when you stumble, you have access to 11 million folks. In FB, you only have access to your friends and whoever they happen to mention it to. Just remember to keep your SU ratio at at least 3-1 .. that is, stumble at least 3 things that are not yours for every one of yours. That way you are sticking to the spirit of SU 🙂
Cheers,
Gil
Gil, what are your ‘time on site’ stats for Stumble visitors? Like you, I see a huge spike in traffic when a page on my site is ‘Stumbled’ but when I drill down I see that the average time on those ‘stumblers’ is exactly 0:00 minutes. Not wanting you to divulge any trade secrets, but does LAAH manage to hook them for a second or two longer than I do ? 😉
Hi Lorne,
I would say that 8 out of 10 pop in and pop out. So yes, they drag down the Time On Site metric as I mention in the article.
BUT
2 out of 10 hang in longer AND come back. And 2 out of 10 is STILL much higher than Twitter for a FRACTION of the time invested. I suspect that its not much different than a google search result. 8 out of 10 google searches will come and go. 2 out of 10 will stay longer.
They are different things. Twitter is a better networking tool. SU is actually considered a search engine (of sorts) now.
Hope this helps 🙂
Cheers,
Gil
I agree. We can Digg our blog posts and Reddit them, but the only serious traffic comes from Stumbleupon. I think it is the random nature that causes this (random meaning something submitted 30 minutes ago has as high a chance of being seen as something submitted 10 seconds ago). At the other services, if a few seconds go by and you haven’t been favored, you probably never will be. You have more of a chance at StumbleUpon.
By the way, I just stumbled upon this blog post itself (I clicked “I Like It” in my browser toolbar).
It seemed like I was the first to do so when the post was made on February 19th.
Does StumbleUpon, unlike Digg, not tell you whether a given URL has already been submitted?
I’m glad I’ve found your site! Not only do its topics appeal to me, this posting in particular is eerily pertinent to something I’m currently working on! Love the synchronicity! I’ll be back for more!
Gil –
I was very surprised to hear that 73% of your referrals have been pushed to your blog via StumbleUpon. I was aware of this service, but did not know of the ability for a marketer to “control” a submission. Are there other marketing initiatives, besides blogs, that utilize this feature? For the most part, I find the content to be private web sites with random content.
– Keith
Hi Keith,
Thank for your comment and your visit. The first time I became aware of SU was at an old music teaching site I have. It usually gets about 100K hits a month even when I don’t publish anything for a long time. One day, a friend of mine was asking for help understanding AW-Stats. So I showed him my stats and noticed that I was up to 450K hits. I looked at the referring sites and noticed that SU had referred 350K hits to me in 3 days! When I dug further, I discovered it was all based on 5 people having reviewed one guitar lesson called – The Spider. That was about 3 years ago. To this day, I still get hits from that event though nowhere near as many. For posterity sake – here is that link: (ignore the 2009 date in the URL – I migrated the old site to WordPress last year)
http://www.synapticstudios.com/2009/guitar-lessons/the-spider-exercise/
Have you had a peek at this link?
http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/
It may answer a few questions for you. I can tell you that if you submit a page to this service, SU has to approve it first. Typically, they wont approve a ‘product’ or a ‘service’. Its not cheap but if used strategically it can have a nice impact on page views and visits. You can also learn more from their Terms Of Use agreement – http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms/ – in particular section 2.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Gil
P.S. I should mention one other thing. I had a small service issue with StumbleUpon. It wasn’t a big deal but I e-mailed them anyway. I really didn’t expect a reply.
Not only did they reply, they dealt with the issue professionally, expeditiously and to my total satisfaction. I hope this isn’t sounding like an ad for SU! I just like to recognize good service, especially these days and especially with web based companies. In my experience, seldom do any of them reply to service issues much less resolve them!
Thanks for the great read Gil!
What I love about Twitter is the learning opportunities that present themselves daily. Your tweet with this post is no exception. I learned something new that I didn’t know about how to effectively use StumbleUpon.
I appreciated the breakdown and clear yet simple explanation of all three. This will come in handy!
Make it a great day!
Tammy
Thanks Tammy 🙂
Glad that it helped. I will for sure make it a great day and I hope yours is a beauty as well!
Cheers,
Gil
Ah, okay … I get it! Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks for this helpful post, Gil! For some reason, I thought you couldn’t stumble your own material though. That the system picked it up or something? I don’t know … I’m just happy that you’re doing all this analysis and not me!
Hi Julie,
I am happy to help 🙂 We don’t stumble Life As A Human from Life As A Human. We stumble it from our own personal accounts. As well, did you know that you can buy ads (referrals) from them? – http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/ –
By the way … I am VERY glad that analysis is done LOL
Cheers,
Gil