Don’t ignore del.icio.us and Stumbleupon

Categories: Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Web AnalyticsPosted on January 13th, 2008

Measurement is important
I’m pretty particular about stats, measurement has always been pretty important, in the corporate landscape measurement is needed to help justify success (or failure) even if you already know something is working to executives. After defining ones goals, you should setup a measurement process to benchmark your progress.

Growth in referring traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon
Lately, I’ve been noticing a crescendo in the referrals from both del.icio.us and Stumbleupon, websites, their currently the 5th and 6th top referrer yet again. Much of the traffic has been coming in my recent Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008, (Update: which has 578 tags on Delicious, and reinforcing comments) which would didn’t do well on Digg (more entertainment geared) I suspect that Delicious and Stumbleupon are more geared towards web professionals. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, where members can tag content, share it with others, and find similar information. Stumbleupon, provides content based upon behavioral matching; as one specifies likes or dislikes, it also recommends content that other members like you prefer. Both are like social based search, as you can see how people really think about your content and how they self-organize.

Others sources
Although there’s not been much change with the dominant referrers to my blog is direct visitors, then Google search, Google refferals, then Twitter, I’m noticing this increase in traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon. Unlike Digg, which gives high levels of spike traffic, both Delicious and Stumbleupon are providing consistently growing traffic patterns and are often in my top 6 refferes

A Web Strategist should incorporate these tools
If you’re a web strategist, you should be looking inside of these tools, look up your content (and your competitors content) and see how the content has been tagged, commented on, and what members have said. You can both find influencers in your market, learn about how to create metadata, SEO, SEM keywords, and gather other intelligence. If you’re truly savvy, you should be tagging all your own content in both of those websites. More here: Web Strategy: Using Delicious for Marketing Research.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 6:04 am and is filed under Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I totally agree..for the last few weeks I’m also seeing flurry of visitors from StumbleUpon but not that much from Del.icio.us..Though you are absolutely right about Digg creating a lot of spikes in the charts…
Like the difference between StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us about being behavioral and else..

Posted by Sampad Swain on January 13th, 2008 at 6:19 am

Thanks Sampad, also worth thinking about, Delicious could be lower in referrals as theres more work to tag content, and find content –unlike the single clicks from digg or stumbleupon.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 13th, 2008 at 6:30 am

I’ve got a hunch that why you’re getting more referrals from Del.icio.us is because of the viral effect from the bookmarks of your site that many of the members could have made. More thn 50% of the search results under “web strategy” lead users here! http://del.icio.us/search/?fr=del_icio_us&p=web+strategy&type=all

Posted by Joanna Teo on January 13th, 2008 at 7:01 am

Thanks Joanna, I added that to the post.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 13th, 2008 at 8:11 am

I am sure I am like a lot of web professionals. I use del.icio.us to save interesting pages, with decent tags so I can search in the long run. (on a side note I wish del.icio.us and yahoo will create a better search facility - one that search’s the saved pages as well as the sites they belong to!)

What I would like to see though on posts is that the writer creates a 255 character summary with some ideal tags. This would make a great plugin for wordpress…

Posted by Jez on January 13th, 2008 at 8:17 am

In regard to stumple upon that is easy.

If I am interested in anything of this topic, your blog is like candy land if I just find it at some place. Most of your articles are standalone as well, aka valuable for a reader jumping in.

Other blogs work more in context or in reaction to news, not so loved in SU. In fact, most of your postings should be in SU which you might check, but if you would do a ‘my favourite articles on my own blog’, ping me a link and I am sure I am not the only one who would take every one of them to submit them to SU and or review them, hence giving you eevn more exposure.

SU is the reason I have discovered some amazing bloggers I never saw before and nowadays I prefer going through SU over going through my feeds.

Posted by Nicole Simon on January 13th, 2008 at 8:45 am

IMHO, the difference is that Digg is best for flagging something of current interest while del.icio.us is best for flagging something of potential future utility. Certainly that would explain the number of times “Many Forms Of…” has been bookmarked on del.icio.us.

Posted by Steven Noble on January 13th, 2008 at 11:26 am

I totally agree that for more relevant readers that del.icio.us and StumbleUpon brings more useful traffic than Digg.

Posted by David Dalka on January 13th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

[...] Don’t ignore del.icio.us and Stumbleupon (tags: social media delicious stumbleupon) [...]

Posted by Shared Reading for 01/13/08 : Chris Webb on Publishing, Media, and Technology on January 13th, 2008 at 8:31 pm

Hi Jeremiah. You’ve talked alot about delicious and stumbleupon in the past, but how abot DIGG? How can a corporate use digg to their benefit? Or can they? Of course they look out for who’s talking about them, etc. But what about a strategy based around digg?

Posted by Christopher Salazar on January 13th, 2008 at 9:40 pm

The traffic on del.icio.us & stumbleupon tends to be more engaged than Digg traffic (temporary spike), largely due to the fact (IMHO) that these sites might cater to folks looking for specific information and/or tags.

Posted by Damon Billian on January 13th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

Chris

Corporations should focus on Delicious and Stumbleupon, as getting on Digg requires access to the 100 that influential.

In the end, the corporation should focus on creating great, engaging, and useful content, and then then trying to get on these tools will just be automatic.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 14th, 2008 at 5:55 am

I think Stumbleupon is best as a content finder, not necessarily a content promoter. Promoting content there, beyond digital photography, isn’t particularly easy.

The most efficient way to deal with stumbleupon is look at the type of content that top stumblers like here:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/topstumblers.php
http://www.stumblerank.com/ was created my M. Saleem and contains a better breakdown of why someone is a top stumbler.

Once you have an idea of the lay of the land, you can pay for stumbles at .05 a pop. Corporate speak content is not going to do well. Stumbleupon claims that it has a smaller click-away ratio than Google Ads.

Internet Marketers may be more interested in the niche community http://sphinn.com/ which covers social media, marketing, and SEO.

Yes! Yes! Yes!
>>>In the end, the corporation should focus on creating great, engaging, and useful content, and then then trying to get on these tools will just be automatic.

Posted by Nathan Ketsdever on January 14th, 2008 at 6:35 am

Hi Jeremiah,

I completely agree with you in regards to the use of social bookmarking sites and the data that can be mined on these sites. There is a lot of valuable information on these sites that marketing professionals - whether that advertising, pr, etc… - can find on these sites about their brand or their content.

I use Delicious more than any of the other social bookmarking sites - mainly because I think it’s very easy and user friendly. I also use the RSS capabilities of Delicious. I subscribe to a lot of bloggers delicious pages because I can see what they might be thinking about but not writing about. In the PR industry this is very valuable to get this understanding of bloggers or traditional journalists alike.

You might be interested in taking a look at the tutorial video that we at PR Newswire created for our clients to get a better understanding of how to use social bookmakring - specifically Delicious.

http://www.revver.com/video/579619/31125-social-bookmarking-tagging/

Also, thanks for all the great information on your blog.

Michael Pranikoff
Director, Emerging Media
PR Newswire

Posted by Michael Pranikoff on January 14th, 2008 at 12:17 pm

Just started using del.icio.us because I got tired of the ‘cut and paste’ I was doing for keeping good content. Besides no tags and so it was nearly impossible to review after a couple of weeks if you’d like to get back. It rally is a productivity solution.

Stumbleupon sure looks great, too but after awhile, clicking and tagging can become a chore and so I often drop or forget to click Stumbleupon.

And does it occur to everyone that you’re posting really interesting content and materials, Jeremiah. Thanks for keeping this up because I have learned a lot in the process.

Posted by Alain Yap on January 15th, 2008 at 11:00 am

Thanks Alain, I’m here to help

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 15th, 2008 at 11:17 am

StumbleUpon has been great for our baby boomer topics vs. Digg. We’ve really seen it work better with having friends and sharing on StumbleUpon.

Posted by Tabz on January 15th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

Oh - and having the plugins for Firefox make it so much easier.

Posted by Tabz on January 15th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

Hi Jeremiah

It’s amazing, (regardind stumble upon) in the last 6 weeks stumble upon traffic has been my leading source for traffic. In the thousands vs. the hundreds for some respective search engines. Social media vs. search engines will be an interesting bout in the future as the ability to drive niche driven traffic proves itself a boon as a result of enhanced conversion. Too early to tell at this point, personally.