Importance of Optimizing for Social Media

• Posted by B Jones on October 24th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

I Submitted a link to Digg last week. It was from a random pictures/ videos/ links blog that I created about a year ago sort of for fun, and also to experiment with social media. I pretty much only post things that I think have the potential to be viral and be shared on other sites.

As soon as I had the idea for this post, I knew that it might have the potential to go popular on Digg. It was funny, new, entertaining, and the word “Amazing” really deserved to be in the title.

Within a few hours of submitting, it had already recieved around 10 to 15 diggs. This one had momentum. Later on that day, it was on the upcoming/most page and was looking good. I started to make the necessary preparations to protect the server. I was ready. And then… just like that… it stalled out. I had already called in all the Digg favors that I could think of. I actually considered getting my wife to sign up for a Digg account, but that would just be too desperate (plus, we have the same IP).

The next day, I checked the story again, hoping that the some late-night social bookmarkers may have come along and helped me out, but to no avail. The clock was just about at the 1 day mark. It was definitely over.

When I checked the stats for the site, I noticed a lot more traffic than usual. Turns out that a completely different page than the one I submitted, had gone popular on a much smaller social bookmarking site, and was getting a nice bit of extra traffic.

A little later that day, I checked the stats again, and someone had submitted the page to Digg, and it was well on it’s way to going popular. It did take until the next morning, but at around 90 or so Diggs, the story went popular.

Importance of Optimizing for Social Media
This digg definitely didn’t go as I planned. It happened in a pretty unexpected way. Sort of indirectly from my submission.

I guess what I thought was good enough to make it wasn’t, but luckily for me, it was enough to get in the door, and get some really valuable exposure to the right person (whoever submitted the site).

To be completely honest, I have submitted my own sites to social bookmarking (SB) sites several times, but apart from Sphinn.com, I’ve never had any of them go popular. Going popular has always been as a result of someone else submitting my sites without my knowledge.

Even though I haven’t had much “success” submitting my own content, I think I have still played a big part in my content being popular on SB sites, because I am always trying to optimize my pages for the social media sites. For me, that pretty much consists of:
- Trying to post viral content
- using compelling and catchy titles
- giving visitors easy access to submission links

I’m not saying that you should go overboard and make every post a “Top Ten” list, or use the word “Amazing” in every other post, just try to keep Social Media in mind when creating content. Try to come up with titles and first sentences that will catch and hold the attention of your target audience, because you never know when some top social bookmarker is gong to come across your site, looking for his next submission.