StumbleUpon, the closet supersite
Social Media is interesting in that almost anything can go “viral” with the right marketing strategy and tactics. Some of these big fads include YouTube’s Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” videos and Jenna Marbles’ videos. Social media marketing and sharing is dominated mostly by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, along with others such as LinkedIn, and Flickr. Of course there are tons and tons of other sharing sites, but no one has time to share and be a part of all of them. A few of Social Media’s more hidden sites include Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. These websites have seemingly been surpassed by the new, more modern and contemporary sites that are more focused on personalization, and people and their opinions, instead of opinions in general. However, what most people do not realize is that StumbleUpon surprisingly drives more referral traffic than both Facebook and Twitter!
StumbleUpon provides a service that allows people to ascertain and share new web sites based on popularity, interests, and different categories. This provides a fantastic new way of marketing for Social Media. StumbleUpon accounts for 50% of the social media traffic in the entire country. The spread of popular links are like wildfire through StumbleUpon with 83% more “stumbles” than Facebook’s 5% “likes” and Twitter’s nonexistent “retweets” within the first 24 hours of the release of these popular links.
The concept of StumbleUpon is very similar to many of the concepts we’ve leraned about in class. For example, StumbleUpon utilizes user feedback and people’s networks of the same interests to provide information for future users of those same interests. Also, the entire idea of web searching and directed graphs of interconnected websites mirrors exactly what StumbleUpon is all about. The website provides thousands and most likely millions of paths to different websites from all over the world. Its ability to direct unknowing users in a random graph of websites most likely accounts for its social media success, whereas Facebook and Twitter direct people to different websites based on their own choice through ads.
StumbleUpon Drives More Traffic Than Facebook Or Twitter – Plus Infographic: