I must admit that I’m relatively late with getting on the social media bandwagon but have started to get more and more involved with different services recently as I attempt to keep up with the latest trends.
Within this article, I’ll briefly cover which tools I’ve found useful and how I use them both personally and professionally as a web designer.
Dzone.com
As a web designer, I’ve had the most success from submitting my articles to Dzone. Obviously this isn’t suitable for all content as it’s purely for the development community but if you write articles within this topic then it’s well worth submitting them to Dzone as you can significantly increase the number of visits to your site, especially if your article makes it into the popular links section.
This can also have the knock on effect that people within this niche also bookmark and submit your article to some of the larger bookmarking sites so it’s a great first step for attracting some attention for your site.
I’ve only started using Twitter this week and whilst I’ve not used it for really promoting articles just yet, it’s useful to follow what others in the industry are getting upto. For example, I’m currently following the likes of Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman in what I could probably describe best as cyber stalking.
StumbleUpon
Initially, I was a bit dubious about the worth of StumbleUpon but having used it for sometime, it can have a huge impact on the amount of visits you receive to your website.
The really strange thing about StumbleUpon, which is completely different to how other social media works, is that it can generate a substantial amount of visitors, even long after the article was first submitted.
Admittedly, this does seem to only be a day or two at a time over the course of a few months but it’s not unusual for one of my articles to receive a few thousand hits purely from StumbleUpon in a day so it’s definitely worth considering as a tool for marketing an interesting or useful article within a website.
Del.Icio.Us
Del.ico.us is a really useful tool for marketing websites and articles but I’ve also started using the Delicious Firefox plugin to keep track of my bookmarks.
It’s a fantastic tool though for pushing articles out to a wider audience especially when an article becomes popular within a certain category. For example, it’s not unusual for some of my articles to be featured within the CSS category which brings in more traffic, which in turn leads to more bookmarks and even more traffic.
Digg
This may come as a surprise but despite Digg being one of the more popular social bookmarking sites, I’m not it’s biggest fan. I don’t use it because I find a lot of the content to be more viral based and contains less informative articles but maybe that’s the whole point of it and in order to be successful on Digg it’s more a case of being funny and different.
Maybe I need to spend a bit of time being a little more creative and write differently when trying to write for Digg users?
Reddit is a bit of a strange one and I was debating whether or not to even include it on my list as I find it a little frustrating. However, it has on occasions sent me some substantial traffic so I felt like I needed to at least mention it.
It’s a bit of a cross between del.icio.us (but not as useful) and Digg. However, no matter how good the articles are that I submit to it and no matter how successful they are on other social media websites, I never seem to have any luck on Reddit.
Technorati
I don’t use Technorati as much as I maybe should but I do have pings setup to update any blogs that I have listed which is a useful tool. The traffic I receive from Technorati is fairly small in comparison to other social media which is maybe why I’ve neglected it somewhat compared to the other services.
Other Social Media
There are plenty of other social media sites out there which I use or have used in the past including Facebook, Bebo, Ma.gnolia which you may find useful.
From my experience, each community is different and finding the right communities which work for you is the hardest part.
The best advice I could give is to keep trying with all the different social bookmarking sites and don’t dismiss them if you don’t get instant success. I initially didn’t have any success at all with either del.icio.us or StumbleUpon so don’t give up after you’re initial attempts if they don’t have an immediate impact.
I have also started using twitter (http://twitter.com/Kick2Kick) to increase my posts for Kick2Kick.net and WotUThink.com. Have received a few extra visitors…
I am curious in how you use stumbleupon etc. Do you stumble, dig etc your own ‘better’ articles?
Pretty much. I usually just submit them and then if the communities that I’ve submitted to them find them useful then they obviously generate more votes and being more popular.
I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there that try and artificially influence things but you’ll usually get find out so I’d just recommend submitting your articles, forget about them and if they become hot etc on the social media sites then it’s a bonus.