Social News Primer



Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of the Web 2.0 revolution has been the development of community driven content. At social news sites, for example, members of an online community submit weblinks to the social news site, at which point the rest of the community votes for or against the content. This results in a massive filtering of content: those weblinks that a sizeable fraction of the community finds interesting are given higher rankings than those of little or no interest.

Social news sites are among the largest and fastest growing on the internet and it seems that every week a new community is developed. Among the most popular are Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and the newcomer Mixx. Certainly some are more popular than others - Digg has the largest community - and each community tends to have a personality, favoring very particular content (which is one of the reasons I hang out at Reddit). From the standpoint of doing business online, it is important to be familiar with these sites and how they operate: as we have written about previously, if your site is highly ranked at a social news community, you can expect to capture a super-spike of web traffic (often referred to as the Digg-effect). So just how do these communities work?

Each site is a bit different, but the overarching principles tend to be the same. Newly submitted links are relegated the “new content” section of the site where they receive their first round of votes. As a link gathers more and more favorable votes, it moves up the stack and closer to the front page of the site. Super-spikes occur when your website makes it to the front page of the social news site which is frequently viewed by both community members and lurkers - people that are not members of the community but visit the page to view see how the community has ranked the content. In every online community, there tend to be substantially more lurkers than participants, so if you are looking to use social news sites to generate massive traffic, visibility on the front page should be your goal. That said, a sizable fraction of these communities will spend time in the “new content” section, so even if your link does not make it to the front page, it is a good habit to ensure that any content you do produce is submitted as you’re guaranteed pageviews.

So content that is popular or interesting rises, through votes, to the front page. There are, of course, caveats to everything: votes alone are not the sole factor that drives a link to the front page. Each site implements its own algorithm to determine whether or not a link rises or falls in the stack. The working public knowledge about the algorithms is limited and they are often revised. Testing various social news sites have found the following variables to be important regarding a link’s fate on a social news site:

Of course, you need votes. Without votes, nothing else matters - your content will get buried. We have said it before and we will say it again: crafting your content to the interests of a particular social news community can facilitate favorable votes for your link. Either way, consider becoming a member of some of these sites and submit your content from time to time. At the very worst, your link gets buried, which should tell you what the community, perhaps potential customers, do not like.

May 16, 2008 |  

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