Is Social News Traffic Worthwhile?

As a blogger I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve reached the front page of Digg a few times, I’ve been Slashdotted a couple of times as well and I’ve even more than a few StumbleUpon storms. I’m by no means an expert on social news but, overall, it has been pretty good to me. I’m always grateful when others submit my work to any social news site and, up until very recently, I went to great, even outrageous, lengths to encourage it.

However, due to a series of problems with my site, I ended up removing all of the social news buttons I had. My original plan was to put them back shortly but I never got around to it. Since then, I’ve suffered no drawback in traffic, as both my visitor and subscriber numbers have continued to climb at approximately the same pace.

The truth is that, while I’ve enjoyed the traffic floods, save for the two times they crashed my server, they have never had much in the way of a lasting impact. When I get a flood of traffic from Digg or Slashdot, the one post involved receives a lot of comments and attention, but once the post cycles off the front page, it is pretty much over.

None of the Digg/Slashdot bumps resulted in a significant increase or subscribers and things pretty much returned back to normal in a day or two. Though I’m not ready, like some, to say Digg traffic is worthless, I definitely think that I may have put too much time and attention on trying to attract Diggs when I should have been focusing on other traffic sources.

The Problem With Digg Traffic

If you are a Digg user (the same can be said for most any other social news site), then you are probably well aware of the problem already. You probably visit a lot of sites through Digg, but stay around at very few. Digg users, by in large, do not subscribe to RSS feeds, do not click ads and, once they’ve left a site, they do not return.

In short, social news is great for providing a short term “bump” but very little of that new audience stays around.. Unless a webmaster can build a site that routinely appears on the front page, there is very little long-term benefit. Though a Digg may be the dream of many blogs, it is actually a very poor way to build blog traffic over the long-term.

However, that isn’t to say that social news is a complete waste of time, just that it may not be worth all of the effort some people put into it.

Alternative Strategies

Though most of the traffic from social news sites seem to come in like a tidal wave and leave just as quickly, that hasn’t been true for all of the traffic sources I’ve watched.

Twitter, though certainly not perfect as a traffic source, does seem to generate a great deal of buzz, especially if you can get your site in the middle of a “tweet storm” and the people who visit your site from Twitter do actually seem to become subscribers. After every tweet storm, I noticed at least a modest jump in my subscriber base.

I suspect this is because, even though the “storm” may be a collective act, people are seeing the links from their friends and family members. Every link is one from a person they have some relationship with, even if it is a very casual one, and that makes it seem more like a personal recommendation than an article that has been recommended by hundreds of strangers.

Likewise, traffic from StumbleUpon seems to generate a reasonable amount of site interaction. Though a run there might not produce the kind of traffic a Digg or a Slashdot might (at least in most cases), readers there do seem to interact more, including subscribing to sites and visiting other pages. Also, on StumbleUpon, the traffic seems to last longer, still producing visitors days and even weeks after the initial rush.

As with Twitter, I think that this is likely a part of how the service is built. StumbleUpon members only see links in categories they are interested in and the focus is on links recommended to them. This seems to help sites featured by StumbleUpon find a better-targeted audience.

Finally, though many bloggers are loathe to mention the mainstream media, I’ve found that my mentions in newspapers and magazines have always been a huge help for me in terms of building my long-term audience. One mention in the Boston Globe three years ago caused my subscribers to jump 60% overnight.

However, none of this is to say that Digg, Slashdot, etc. are useless, far from it. Rather, the bulk of their benefits probably lie outside their direct traffic.

The Benefits of Social News

Once we look past the traffic aspect of social news (from a blogger’s point of view), there are other reasons to promote to Digg, Reddit and similar sites.

1. Non-Crushing Traffic: Most stories don’t reach the front page of Slashdot, Digg or Reddit. But even those in the bowels of the site can drive some traffic and those visitors tend to be much more attentive than the “click and move” ones that read only the front page.
2. Search Engine Benefit: Though it seems unlikely a link on the front page of a site will help you much since the links change so frequently, the permalinks buried within social news sites are routinely indexed and can count to your SEO. The amount of benefit is up for debate, but it certainly can’t hurt.
3. Notoriety: If you reach the front page of a site even once or twice, visitors will likely remember your site, at least on some level, and when they come back later for an unrelated reason they’ll have a better opinion of it. Achieving the front page may be as much about laying the groundwork for your brand than it is the traffic it brings.

What this means is that having users submit your articles to social news is not a bad thing nor is it useless, but it is not the holy grail of blogging many make it out to be. Being Dugg once will not bring you into the big leagues any more than buying a few thousand visitors would. A social news strategy can, and should be, a part of your overall traffic strategy but it should not be something to obsess over.

It is that simple.

Bottom Line

When it is all said and done, I did add back a small “Share This” button to my site. Not only does it allow access to Digg, Reddit and other big social news sites, but it lets people email, IM and tweet out stories as well.

In the past, I’ve admittedly gotten carried away with my social news efforts but now I think it is time for me, and probably many others, to scale back and reevaluate.

While these sites definitely have a role and the lure of thousands of instant visitors can be very tempting, the long-term benefit is just not as great as many think it is.

Written by Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today
Posted on May 28th, 2009 and filed under Blogging, Social Media
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