For those of you who still don’t “get” StumbleUpon, let me put it to you simply: On multiple occasions I have become a new customer for different companies simply because I stumbled into them on SU and liked what I saw. So, if you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon, you could be missing out on one of the best and easiest opportunities to grow and promote your business online. As a primer, SU is what is called a “discovery engine”, a site that allows people to discover websites based on their personal tastes. It comes in a variety of formats from apps to …
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Social media is fascinating in that businesses and professionals are often using all of these websites for things they were never intended for. Although it feels as if Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest have been around forever, believe it or not quite a few of these sites came from humble beginnings with very different intents. From dorm rooms to couches, let’s look back to the history as to how the most popular social networks began – and perhaps learn some trivial knowledge that can help deepen our appreciation for these platforms.
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Social bookmarking websites always confuse my social media strategy customers. There seems to be an aura that somehow just posting all of your own content to these sites will somehow magically drive massive traffic to your website. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. And unless you have a certain objective or niche demographic that tends to find a large population of your targeted users using sites like Digg, Reddit, or Delicious, my advice is simply to concentrate efforts on other more popular sites. I will make one exception, though: StumbleUpon. First of all, StumbleUpon is not a niche site. …
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If you’ve been reading my blog and following my tweets, you’ll know that I am a huge evangelizer of StumbleUpon for marketing and professional use. I consume my media a little different than other people. I’m not an RSS person. I know the blogs and websites that I find resourceful and will visit them. I search for the latest conversations on Twitter to see what people are talking about. And I use StumbleUpon to help me find new sources of relevant information that I might be interested in but might never have found otherwise. Let me explain it another way: …
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While everyone knows that Facebook is the default choice for any business-to-consumer (B2C) social media marketing, what social media channels are important for businesses hoping to engage with other businesses (B2B)? How can these types of businesses use social media to engage with their potential clients, gain mindshare and be perceived as a thought leader in their industry, and increase potential clients visiting their website? Here are the six that I would recommend to most businesses. Note that, in order to create a sound social media strategy, you should not limit yourself to these 6 B2B social media channels and …
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O.K., I am going to admit that I first joined StumbleUpon as part of a strategy that the “SEO [Search Engine Optimization] Gurus” recommend to create backlinks to your blog content from social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. The idea being that the more links you have from other sites, the higher your SEO will be. And, as anyone who has ever used StumbleUpon just for this reason will tell you, you quickly realize that you are just wasting your time because just by thumbing up your own blog posts you are not gaining any significant additional traffic to …
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