By the time Social Media was recognized to be a viable marketing technique, digg was already king of the hill. But as Social Media grows, so does the time required to be effective. Is it worth it? Or can your time be better spent elsewhere?
Social Media
The general technique with digg is to submit stories that will reach the front page, over time your user name and profile image become a “recognizable brand”.
Those who’s ultimate goal is becoming a Social Media Consultant, might revel in this advantage. For the rest of us, being considered a top digg user, is just another title to add to our ego.
In the past you could use Social Media to jump start a blog. The community was made up of mature, technologically savvy, blog owners.
John Chow took full advantage of this when starting his blog, and used digg as a ladder to a larger userbase. But as the digg community evolved, we lost the platform digg used to be.
Credit
Nowadays, the average digg user has become more childish. This forced digg to implement new features, like comment thresholds, and were forced to overhaul their algorithm.
Digg still sends the traffic it was known for, but the quality of traffic suffers. No longer is digg the plaything of solely the technologically inclined, but the playground is shared by everyone.
The untargetted, usually immature traffic, is hardly useful for most webmasters. The spike in visitors falls off quickly, and for the ill prepared, crashes servers. Blog owners get the pleasure of moderating ridiculous comments, from visitors who most likely will never return.
The bottom line is, Social Media, is similar to a dumb bomb. The idea is to hit your site with large numbers of traffic, in the hopes that some will stay. What we’re noticing, lately, is that because of Social Media’s casual browsing culture, less people come back.
Social Networking
Enter the new kids on the block. Social Networking includes, Twitter, Plurk, and BrightKite. This new type of Social Media, makes connecting with large numbers of people easy and continuous.
Social Networking required a time commitment akin to being a power user on digg, but in my opinion, talking to people is more enjoyable than digging and submitting stories.
The question remains, what do you get out of being popular on Social Networking sites?
First, you build a reputation. On digg your reputation is based on the stories you submit, however, on Twitter and Plurk your repuration is based on what you say.
The reputation builds your popularity, and as you move from a conversation follower, to a conversation starter, you gain the title of power user.
But other than a measly title, the potential for driving targeted traffic is why people love Social Networking.
Consider that you have 2,000 followers on Twitter. All of them are already interested in what you have to say and because of Twitter’s community, are most likely bloggers. If even half your followers visit your site everyday time you share a link, you’ve gotten 1,000 readers for the day.
The negative side to this system is that you’re more likely to get returns visitors instead of new ones. Getting new visitors is contingent on you continually building your social networking profile.
To reuse the bomb metaphor from before, social networking is like a laser guided missile, although less destructive, it’s more targeted.
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