Social Media Gamblers: Learn to Play the Odds

Creating viral content for social media is always a gamble. Seemingly great pieces can unexpectedly flop while poorly written blog posts and strange images can go viral without any effort from the creator. In most ways, the success of viral marketing is out of the hands of the marketers. Yet, smart marketers, just like smart gamblers, know there are certain things they can do to help their chances.

Some Tips:

The last point is the one that I think is the least practiced.

At SEOmoz, our annual top referrers are direct access, search engines, and the social media websites, Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com. We receive massive traffic from direct access and search engines by creating unique quality content on a daily basis and providing useful tools to attract return visitors. These techniques are our safe bet. They send us steady traffic every day. Sometimes, however, we like to roll the dice.

The Grand Prize

Digg.com is the massively popular social ‘news’ website. It gets an unholy amount of press and produces fierce competition to get to its homepage. The lucky ones who do get to the homepage receive between 50 and 100 thousand visits in a two day period.

This phenomenon has led many social media marketers to spend the majority of their time trying to get their content on Digg.

The Gamble

Last week Jane and the development crew launched the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards. Most of the SEOmoz team (myself included) then started working on a social media marketing campaign to promote our new article.

As soon as the article was submitted to Digg I started tracking the submission’s Diggs and the amount of referrers from Digg.com on a minute by minute basis.

I then compared this to the referrers we were getting from StumbleUpon for the same article.

For a broader perspective, I tracked the view statistics from three other successful SEOmoz articles that had been submitted to both StumbleUpon and Digg.

Case studies

1. The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet
2. Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains
3. 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should)
4. 2008 Web 2.0 Awards

All of this data has led me to believe that StumbleUpon is really the better bet for the focus of my social media campaigns. Over time StumbleUpon simply yields better results than Digg. This is not to say that submitting to Digg is worthless. I think new marketers should always put in some effort to ensure that their viral content gets submitted to Digg with the appropriate meta data. However, unless they have access to a Digg power account, I think their (and my) marketing efforts are better spent elsewhere. My data tells me that my efforts at social marketing are much better spent trying to get stumbles.

Overall Referrers for 2007