A Cre8asite Forums thread asks "But Is The Traffic Any Good?" Meaning, is Digg or social media traffic, quality traffic?
Administrator, projectphp, explains that it is a huge benefit for a site selling ads based on a CPM basis. I agree, advertisers love more impressions, but they also love clicks. Are Digg users more likely to click on your ads? I don't have data on that on hand. But the impressions are nice.
There are a ton of ideas brought up in the thread as to why a social media campaign benefits you. With me, social media campaigns, such as a Digg home page listing, helps tremendously with link building.
I have a case study for you. I won't say the client's name, but I was showing them Digg the other day. I told them that if they had any geek or tech related posts, they should submit it to Digg. The other day they posted a geek related topic and I decided to show them the power of Digg.
I submitted the article to Digg and asked a few buddies to help seed it early. Then later in the day, the article made it to the Digg home page, and it stuck. By the time I turned around, it had around 1,700 Diggs!
Let me give you some quick stats:
Digg: ~1,700 Digg Referrals: 50,000~ in two day
del.icio.us Saves: 34 del.icio.us referrals: 31
StumbleUpon Referrals: ~300
Netscape Votes: ~25 Netscape Referrals: ~125
Reddit Referrals: ~75
Then there are tons of referrals from random sites and other social media sites.
To me this is all find and dandy. But did those referrals lead to anything except wasted bandwidth?
Yea, a lot of links!
According to Google Blog Search's link command, their blog received over 60 new links within 2 days. On average, they may get a few links per day. Now, I am sure they got way more than 60 links, so I made sure to take a snapshot of their linkage data in both Yahoo! and Google before and will check again in about a month.
Overall, I think the power of Digg and Social Media sites is all about link building. Of course the initial burst in traffic and impressions are nice. But honestly, most Digg users are not in any "buy mode."
Let me clear about one thing. The article was written solely for the blog reader. Only after the fact, did I look at the article my client wrote and say, hey - Digg users would love this. Only then did I submit that article to Digg. I am sure most of you can figure out which article it was, so enjoy.
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