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A brief guide to social news sites

As competition among online news sites grows fierce, a trend has emerged whereby organizations have begun to encourage their readers to submit their various articles to social news site such as Digg, Reddit and Propeller.

While the partnership between traditional media and social news seems at first odd, it makes a great deal of sense. Social news sites gain legitimacy by prominently featuring high-quality articles from trusted news sources. Traditional media receive a surge of traffic every time a story is made popular and taps into a new audience, one that is news savvy and technically literate.

This has caused many prominent news outlets to include links to social news sites in a bid to promote their articles, images and videos. The list of sites carrying social news buttons includes Reuters, The New York Times, The London Times, The BBC,  and CNN among others.

As web journalists and news organizations begin to look to social media as a way to boost their traffic, the question becomes: Which sites to promote? There are literally dozens of social news sites but only a handful are prominent. And, of those, some are not always a good fit.

To help with this, we’ll take a brief look at five prominent social news sites, how they operate and the types of content they typically promote.

Digg

Digg is by far the largest social news site and, according to analysis site Compete is one of the top 50 sites on the web. Users of Digg vote for sites and articles they enjoy by “Digging” them. When an article gets the required number of Diggs, a number determined by an algorithm the site uses, it appears at the very top of the Digg homepage.

Alhough users of Digg tend to be more technically inclined than your average Internet user, Digg features a variety of news on its front page. At any given time you can find news about sports, video games, world events and politics as well as interesting images and offbeat stories/videos.

Virtually all companies that promote on social news sites include Digg in their list of sites due to both the popularity of the site and the variety of news it covers.

Reddit

Widely regarded as the second most popular social news site, Reddit is more technical in nature than Digg. While a wide variety of articles do make it to the front page of Reddit, the site tends to focus more on a mix of technology and politics than its counterpart.

Reddit is unique in that users can either vote up (upmod) or vote down (downmod) an article, based upon their preference. This means readers can not only work to promote articles that they like, but try hinder articles that they don’t.

Also largely unique to Reddit is that articles works their way up through secondary pages. They don’t merely appear on the front page. Furthermore, an article, even once it reaches the front page, can move up and down over the course of the day.

Reddit is very popular to promote alongside Digg, especially on sites with a focus on technology that might appeal to Reddit’s users.

Propeller

Formerly Netscape.com, Propeller has exceeded expectations and become a solid third in the social news world.

Propeller’s front page works a great deal like Digg’s but is unique in that it is a combination of social news and a traditional web portal. Although the main block of stories are voted for by users, they are supported by a group of editors known as anchors. These anchors add commentary, ensure that links point to the correct stories and manage a recommendation section at the top of the page.

The stories on Propeller tend to focus heavily on politics, news and features and typically contains less technology or humor stories than either Digg or Reddit.

Propeller, since it is relatively new, is not regularly targeted by news sites or even blogs. However, as its traffic grows, it may be worth taking a look at, especially since there is currently less competition to reach the front page.

Del.icio.us

Delicious is technically not a social news site, but rather a social bookmarking site where people save their favorite pages and share them with others. That being said, Delicious does have a “Hot Now” section on its home page that functions similarly to other social news sites. Links that are popular on the service can generate a great deal of traffic as users often follow one another’s bookmarks.

Content on Delicious is, quite literally, as varied in nature as the content on the web. However, the front page tends to favor either unusual or useful sites. Individual articles, although popular to bookmark, don’t usually make it to the Hot Now section.

That said, Delicious is a frequent target for promotion because embedding Delicious buttons on your site is not only a convenience for users, who are often Delicious users, but a great way to build links and word of mouth advertising.

Delicious may never bring the kinds of traffic floods seen elsewhere, but it is generally a worthwhile site to include.

Stumbleupon

Stumbleupon is, technically, not so much a site as it is a browser toolbar for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Stumbleupon lets users click a “Stumble” button to be taken to a random site that the extension thinks that the user will enjoy. The site is chosen based upon the user’s preferences and past voting habits and is submitted by other users of the service.

Once they have “Stumbled” a site, visitors can vote for a site that they like. The more members that vote for a page or site, the more likely it is to appear when others click the stumble button. As the probability increases, more and more people are driven to the site, often times creating a rush of visitors.

While Stubleupon doesn’t generally produce the numbers of other social news sites, the traffic is generally much more targeted and can come over a much longer span of time. Instead of being just an instant crush of traffic that fades away, Stumbleupon can provide a steady stream of visitors that are targeted to your site.

As such, Stumbleupon is another popular choice among news sites for targeting when promoting to social news sites.

General Tips

If you are considering adding buttons or encouraging your visitors to submit your stories to social news outlets, there are several things to consider.

1. 1. Have a Powerful Server: Social news sites can bring tens of thousands of visitors to your site in a matter of minutes. It takes a great deal of server power and bandwidth to handle that kind of rush. Larger companies likely won’t have much to worry about as they have the infrastructure in place, but small to medium-sized businesses may need to upgrade their service lest the “Digg Effect”, the name Digg readers have for when the traffic surge from Digg knocks a site offline, take ahold.
2. 2. Don’t Over-Promote: There are dozens of social news sites, most of which are not mentioned here, but try to limit your offerings to just a few of the bigger sites and perhaps one or two in your niche.
3. 3. Be Patient: Even larger, well-known news sites cannot count on being blasted with traffic from social news sites every single day. It can take quite some time before an article makes a major appearance on a social news site. Remember that social news is just a part of a larger traffic strategy and not something to rely on solely.

Conclusions

Social news sites, if targeted properly, can be a great source of traffic and, in the long run, a great boost to revenue. They are rapidly become vital sources of news and information for the web and are touchstones for many of the web’s savviest users.

If your company is not exploiting social news already, it is probably time to begin thinking about how to do so. After all, social news traffic, in addition to being a powerful force, is also completely free.

All it takes is a few moments to add the appropriate buttons to your site, a process that takes a webmaster only a few minutes on average.

Of course, even without those buttons, it is very possible that some of your visitors are already submitting your stories to these and other sites. If you take a look at your referrers, you may find that much of your traffic already comes from these domains.

 




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Jonathan Bailey is a writer and webmaster from New Orleans. He graduated with honours from the University of South Carolina with a degree in Journalism and Mass Communications. He is at present an advertising specialist, graphic designer, IT guru and whatever else pays the bills. He became interested in researching and fighting plagiarism after a significant body of his own creative writing was plagiarised. He also runs his own website, Plagiarism Today.



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Tags: digg, internet, reddit, social news site, technology, user, web journalist,

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