Posted by on June 7th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Social Media, Social Network |
Digg has surely changed the way Internet users discover and share content from anywhere around the web. It allows people to freely submit their own content (or someone else’s) and share the information to other Digg users. As a social news website, Digg has taken the social bookmarking world by storm and has offered people innovative ways to learn about new information and assess its value. We would miss out a lot if we don’t grab the opportunity to learn how to use it on our benefit and if we don’t learn how to maximize its potential. Digg is a very popular social media promotional strategy that we can use freely. Given that the service is free, it is one of the most sought after websites around the web, being usually in the top 100 of the worldwide Alexa traffic rankings and in the top 50 of U.S. traffic rankings. As of the moment, Digg is the 10th most popular Web 2.0 site based on Alexa Global Traffic Rank and U.S. Traffic Rankings.
Getting Help from Digg Tools
Even if Digg is powerful and popular in itself, it seems more difficult these days to maximize its potential and promote something that a lot of people will see. With more and more people using Digg, the playing field has become more competitive. Thus, submitting content and making sure that your content is disseminated and given enough positive votes (“digs”) to bring it to the front page needs so much time and hard work. Remember that in Digg, you are always fighting for votes and popularity. The more “diggs” your content gets from other users, the higher the chances Digg will deem it relevant enough to put in on its home page, where it will then get an astronomically greater number of views.
To get ahead of the playing field, we can utilize external tools to help us in our Digg campaigns. The following applications can help Digg users get that popularity and traffic they have always wanted in Digg.
DiggWatcher
DiggWatcher helps you monitor your Digg submission’s popularity and status even while you are not using Digg itself. It is a downloadable application that informs if your story receives new comments, new diggs, and if your story is placed on Digg’s front page. You can consider it your personal Digg assistant.
Social Blade
Social Blade is an external Digg tool that provides users with front page analytics, a list of Digg’s top users, and a social media community forum. Social Blades’ analytics supplies data from the content submitted to Digg and presents in detail each article’s statistics at the time it hits Digg’s front page. It shows numbers and trends about the global story averages based on the number of diggs a submission had when it was placed in the front page. The data are also presented in detailed graph the number of diggs, the percentage of friendly diggs, comments, and diggs per hour of the submissions.
Social Blade also shows the usernames of the top 100 Digg users (“Diggers”) and their respective statistics including number of submissions, frequency of diggs, and profile views. The list is updated every time you click or refresh the list.
The tool also includes a community forum where users can talk and exchange information about different social media sites including Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Twitter. It also includes sections that are not related to Social Blade and social media.
Social Blade is a great tool that will help you understand the trends and the kind of information you can emulate to put your own content to Digg’s front page. With Social Blade’s data, you can determine the number of diggs it took the submissions to get to the front page and make use of the prevailing trends.
DI66
DI66.net provides a detailed analysis of the prevailing trends seen from Digg submissions. This tool presents the common attributes of the popular submissions and how these submissions are doing. It tracks down the most frequently used words in titles and descriptions, the top sources of Digg submissions, the top diggers, and the most popular topics in daily, weekly, monthly and yearly intervals. The data allows you to analyze what are the popular submissions at the moment and what content characteristics are in-demand so you can formulate your own front page-worthy content.
MiniDigg
MiniDigg is an Adobe Air widget allows you to view and track on your submissions and other content. You can conveniently keep an eye on the submissions that rise to popularity in real time while you are away and not using Digg itself. It records the progress of your own content and of others within your niche. Use this to keep yourself updated with what’s hot and what’s not on Digg.
Friend Statistics
Use this utility to find out who among your friends have dugg your last 10 articles. You can enter your username at http://friendstatistics.com/ to analyze your friends list and discover who are following or ignoring you. You can also monitor the users outside your Digg friends list for who have dug more than five of your entries so you can add them to your list as well. This is a very effective tool to help you establish a broad network of friends. As a social media network, connections are crucial in Digg; they can make or break the success of your submissions.
Digg Extension for Firefox
This is a downloadable add-on application if you are using a Mozilla Firefox web browser. This add-on Digg menu is a lightweight extension of Digg that allows you to get connected with the latest popular content on Digg. The Digg extension informs you if the page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg. If the page is already submitted to Digg, the extension shows you the number of diggs and comments the page has, the last 10 users that dugg the page, the most popular comments, and other articles submitted to Digg from the same web site, if any. You can also dig pages that you are currently browsing. I
f not, you can submit the page yourself easily with one click.
When using the extension at the same time with the Digg website, you can see your friends’ activities including diggs, submissions, and comments.
BiggBoard
This tool can also help you to find out which of your submissions are hot and which aren’t. BiggBoard lets you identify which of your stories are getting popular across the different “hot” categories and which are getting buried. It will help you identify which categories suit your submissions best and which submissions are already ineligible for a front page stint. You can access the Story Tracker section for the hottest submissions on Digg from all its users, and you can find out if yours are among them at the moment.
Get Some Help
It’s a big challenge these days for your stories to land on Digg’s front page because of the surging number of submissions Digg receives everyday. Despite this, you can adjust accordingly with the help of these tools. If you know how to use them effectively, you can come up with your own surefire strategies to submit content worthy of a front page stint.
