Social media is everywhere recently. It’s almost hard to call yourself respectable marketer if you don’t know the in’s and out’s. So to hone your social media skills, here’s 5 questions about Digg with social media analyst/blogger and uber-digger Muhammad Saleem.
How did you get into Digg?
I don’t recall exactly how but it was about 2 years ago. At first I was just looking around, then I registered and started submitting and Digging stories. It wasn’t until I got my first story on the home page that I really got into it.
Is it frowned on when users digg their own content?
It varies from site to site. On Digg it is frowned on when people submit their own content but on some of the other sites its not as bad. Here’s a great article that explores this idea and why it’s absolutely necessary that users of social sites must create and submit their own content.
http://dmiessler.com/blogarchive/dear-readers-please-submit-your-own-content
Do you think Digg is the best of the social news sites?
There is no one ‘best’ site. It really depends on the kind of experience you’re looking to have. Digg is certainly the biggest and most active of the communities but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best. The way I see it each community offers something different and unique, that is why other sites like Netscape, Reddit, StumbleUpon and so on have managed to get hundreds of thousands of loyal users.
How can the average person/business benefit from Digg?
There are several ways the average user can use Digg. By submitting and voting on content that you find informative, entertaining, or generally interesting, you help share that content with the masses. Furthermore, by voting and commenting on content that other people have submitted and befriending users that share your interests you can also use the site as a (primitive) social networking tool.
Of course this is different from how content producers and marketers (who are not ‘average’ users) benefit from the site.
What’s the best way to turn the “digg effect” into repeat visitors?
There are several things to keep in mind.
1. The ‘Digg effect’ will send you thousands of visitors in a short period of time. to benefit from this you have to first make sure that your site is up for all these visitors to see (if your servers can’t handle the traffic and the users can’t see the content, the Digg effect is wasted). If your site does stay up, there are several other things you can do.
2. Make sure you have a ’subscribe to rss feed’ button, text, or chicklet displayed somewhere prominently. If the can see the subscribe button, some of the thousands of visitors are bound to subscribe to your content and come back for more.
3. Once your site gets on Digg it is bound to generate some links as people reblog your content or write about it and link to you. This means that you will get additional traffic from other sites in the following days, and from people seeing your content on Digg and submitting it to other social sites. To take advantage of this, don’t stop now, keep publishing new content so that the new visitors can see a steady flow of new articles to read, which gives them an incentive to subscribe to your feed, and possible even submit those newer articles to social news sites.
Thanks Muhammad. But how about you, would you like to be the next person on 5 Questions? Email me with your name and specialty to let me know.
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