StumbleUpon and Social Media Marketing
2 April 2007Great post today on SEL about how even small businesses can use social media to get noticed. Matt McGee lists six good places to start:
- Start a blog/Comment on other blogs
- Get active at Yahoo Answers
- Make and share videos
- Take and share photos
- Try StumbleUpon
- Join groups & mailing lists
From my experience doing promotional work for the This Week in Science podcast I can attest to the effectiveness of StumbleUpon for good quality traffic. With TWIS we were lucky to have a site that was rich in non-commercial content, but the same strategies we used could probably be employed for most websites with some degree of success.
- Get yourself a StumbleUpon account at http://www.stumbleupon.com/. Right off you’ll be asked to download the SU Toolbar, I use Firefox so in my case the Toolbar download was a Firefox Add-on hosted on the Mozilla website. Your StumbleUpon account is directly tied to your toolbar installation, making multiple accounts and other nefarious activities difficult. Install the Toolbar and complete the sign-up process
- Now take the time to read the Community Rules at http://www.stumbleupon.com/rules.html. SU is very community oriented and tends to take a dim view to commercial use. When posting commercial content to SU any other social media community you should first give yourself an honest reality check and ask yourself if the site in question has any value to the users of the community. Respectful behavior is key. In the case of TWIS we had a popular, completely ad-free podcast . In short, we had a unique and free product to offer to the community with no expectations in return. Even with this open approach we still received criticism from a few SU members.
- Now you’ll want to Update Your Topics. On you Toolbar under “Tools” select Update Topics. Choose the most relevant topics from the selections provided. Keep in mind that while selecting a large number of topics may make you visible to more people, it also tends to dilute your topical focus. For TWIS we selected only science topics, insuring a clear focus on “Science”.
- Now it’s time to add some content. Each time you hit the “Stumble” button on the Toolbar you’ll be directed to a new webpage from one of your Topics. Each of these pages was added by a SU member. When you see a page you like, hit the “I like it” thumbs-up button and it’ll be added to your list of SU content. Do this about 20 times to get a starting list of recommended pages and try to Stumble new sites at least once a week for best results.
- SU is based on “friends” so now it’s time to go out into the SU community and add some people to your friend list. As with ‘Topics’ try to only select friends that are interested in your topic of interest to help keep everything well targeted. Also selecting friends who are themselves friends with lots of other people will help increase the size of your network - look for a full green or blue box next to their name. You can have up to 200 friends.
- You can also post recommended webpages and reviews of sites and SU users to your SU blog at http://YOURUSERNAME.stumbleupon.com/. The key to doing well on SU is remembering that it’s a community. Make a genuine effort to make friends and provide useful resources to the community and you’ll soon see large numbers of SU referrals in your logs.
