Digital Marketing Consultant

StumbleUpon redesign gives the site a fresher, more visual look that is easier to navigate and simpler to use. The introduction of Channels provides a separate space where brands and companies can promote themselves, a less obviously commercial version of the site’s Paid Discovery service which some 60,000 products, publishers and other sellers have already used.

For marketers though, the question is whether they should be using it at all.

StumleUpon recently landed its 20 millionth member. Although that’s only a fraction of the 800 million or so people who regularly use Facebook if those 20 million people include your core buyers, then being active on the site might well be an important part of your social media strategy — or should be.

The site throws up some unique challenges though. It’s a social bookmarking service rather than a fully-fledged social media site. Think of Facebook with only the option to like (and un-like) a site, and those sites thrown up to visitors almost at random so that they “stumble upon” new publishers and firms with content and products that interest them.

It’s the “almost” that makes the difference. Click the Stumble button and StumbleUpon will offer a page based on interests, preferences and friends. The site tries to target pages to its readers, a system that allows for some influence. Recommend pages in the same field as your firm’s, follow other Stumblers and suggest more pages, and there’s a better chance that your own Web pages can win more views. That’s useful if your main goal on social media is to drive traffic to your website. 

And that can happen. A recommendation on StumbleUpon can deliver a sudden spike in view numbers. Once that happens, the page can sometimes turn up again, delivering occasional spikes in popularity.

Digg — another social bookmarking site —  has been known to deliver even bigger spikes but the site is also known for not delivering sales. Win a high ranking on Digg and the sudden burst of popularity can be enough to crash even mid-sized servers. Companies have found that very few of those new visitors bother to click through or buy.

It all comes down not to functionality but to demographics. StumbleUpon was long thought of as the “everyman” of social bookmarking sites, a place that was simple enough for anyone to use and where the Web pages offered covered a broad range of topics. (On Digg, you can expect to find lots of weird news stories, technology links and raving reviews of Ron Paul.) That title has probably now been taken by Facebook. But StumbleUpon’s users might be more geeky than many thought.

Analysis of StumbleUpon traffic to websites has revealed that the site’s readers are heavy Firefox users, with as many as 93 percent using the open source browser. One site came up with a profile of the typical StumbleUpon user as a 26-year-old, middle class, Firefox-using student with a big screen and a PC.

The question for marketers though is whether those students are likely to be buying our products. You can figure that out by tracking those visitors through Google Analytics to the purchase page. 

If you are getting traffic from StumbleUpon — and that traffic is buying — you are going to need to learn more about StumbleUpon’s new design.

Social Media Use

People are changing the way they shop for products and services. They go to the Internet to find and gather information so that they can make an informed decision. It is much easier to get the information that you need by searching on Google than to look up a phone number in the Yellow Pages and then call. We just don’t want to be sold to.

Besides searching on Google, people are also looking for information on a number of social media sites such as:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Blogs
• Twitter
• Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites

These social media sites enable us to get the “word of mouth” recommendations and advice that we all seek when considering making a purchase of a product or service.

Generation Y

Many of us in the “Baby Boomer” community think that social media is a trend for the younger generations “X” and “Y” as they are the most active in this medium.

The Generation “Y” population is over 70 million in America and by 2010 they will outnumber Baby Boomers. They will become our future leaders and the majority of them have been raised with technology and belong to one or more social networks.

Companies must start incorporating social media strategies into their marketing initiatives to engage with the Generation Y’s now to avoid being left behind in targeting this growing segment.

If you have not already, you should check out our free Wisdom Book.

With Ping.fm you can revise all of your social networks including your LinkedIn status at one time and it is even a free service.  You do not have to log into each network individually and review the status within each network.  You can utilize Ping.fm to simultaneously revise all of your networks.  This makes efficient use of your valuable time.

Revising with Ping.fm

You will first need to add to your list of social networks, LinkedIn.   Simply log into ping.fm and follow the links to add networks on the Dashboard.  You will select LinkedIn, confirm and that is all there is to it.

You now can send a tweet concerning your LinkedIn status revision.

Revising  with Twitter®…

To revise your LinkedIn status with Twitter, you will need to go to your LinkedIn profile to add your account for Twitter.  To identify the network which will receive and post the tweet include #in or #li in the message field of tweets you send. A  In just a very short time you will see you’re the revision in your LinkedIn.  In just a short while you will see your status in LinkedIn is revised.

@replies are filtered out by LinkedIn, therefore tweets sent with @LinkedIn will not revise your LinkedIn profile.

You can revise your status using your cell phone as well as by email using both Ping.fm and Twitter.   Your status can virtually be revised from just about any location.

After you have finished adding to your LinkedIn profile a Twitter account you will be able to use Twitter to revise your LinkedIn status by following these steps.

1. Under network updates enter in the text field your status update.
2. Next to the Twitter icon click on the box.  Using the drop down box select the Twitter account you desire to send the revision to, that is if you have more than one Twitter account linked to LinkedIn.
3. Click "share."

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