A Focus On StumbleUpon: The Rise Of A Social Media Giant

Since my technology company in Atlanta is part of the Apple Consultants Network, I am invited to attend the webinar trainings that Apple puts together. They are always outstanding, and there is a lot to learn each time. Yesterday I attended a social media webinar in which there was a Q&A at the end. I noticed that most of the questions came from small business owners that were concerned about time management with regard to social media.

It seems like it’s a question I hear people ask on all different platforms, whether it’s an Apple webinar, through a tweet on Twitter or even a Facebook message. People want to know where to spend their time, and which site has the greatest ROI. When you start trying to measure ROI in social media, you often enter a cloudy and hazy area. I don’t care how many experts and gurus try to say they have the magical formula, we at Bit Rebels have found that it doesn’t work like that. It’s all about building relationships and engagement, not about dollars and cents.

If you are new to social media, and if there is one piece of advice I can give you, it’s to remember that it’s not traditional marketing. It’s in a different category all together, and the same things that work in traditional marketing will repel almost everyone in social media. On the flip side, being successful in social media is not difficult. Just think of it as a big cocktail party where you can wear your pajamas if you want.

We don’t sell anything on our site to our readers. We have clients that purchase advertising space, but we don’t sell a product or service, we simply share information on topics we find interesting. For us, it’s all about pageviews. We have a combined four Twitter accounts between us, and one Facebook fan page. That comes out to about 250,000 Twitter followers across four accounts, and over 14,000 Facebook friends on Facebook.

Back in March, I wrote an article called Twitter vs. Facebook: A Social Media Revenue Comparison. I concluded in that article that Facebook brings a lot more traffic to our site than Twitter. Even today, almost ten months later, that is still true. However, what about the other sites out there? There is still not a lot of conclusive information available about Google+ since I think most people are still in the “let’s wait and see what happens” mindset. However, reddit, StumbleUpon and some of the other sites are definitely holding their own when it comes to bringing web traffic.

Personally, I love reddit, and I recently wrote an article called The Reddit Special Sauce For Success. Today though, it’s all about StumbleUpon. My friend, TheDudeDean, is ranked about number six on StumbleUpon, and before I knew him, I really didn’t know anything about it. Let’s take yesterday on this site for example. We had around 104,000 unique visitors here on Bit Rebels. Of that, 30,000 pageviews came from this one post alone because it was viral on StumbleUpon: Famous Photographs From History Recreated In Lego.

That was not a one-time occurrence either. These posts: 20 Captivating Photos Shot At Exactly The Right Moment and Star Wars If Dr. Seuss Had Created It both went viral on StumbleUpon also (and there are many more). Please don’t think I’m in any way bragging, of course I’m not. If you know me, you know I’m not like that, and we truly love and appreciate every one of our visitors. All I’m trying to illustrate is that if you haven’t checked out StumbleUpon, I think it would be worth a little time learning about that site. It’s easy to put blinders on and only think about Twitter and Facebook, but there are so many other sites, like StumbleUpon, that are worth looking into also.

My friend Neil Spencer and his team at Column Five Media recently put together this infographic about the life cycle of a web page on StumbleUpon. There is a lot of great information on this. If you are a social media stats junkie, you will probably also like this graph on StatCounter which ranks the top 7 social media sites in the United States, and you’ll be able to see the growth of StumbleUpon. According to this article on Social News Daily, StumbleUpon brings even more web traffic than Facebook. However, be careful about comparing those two since it’s like comparing apples and oranges. There are a lot of different factors to consider. If you would like to learn more about StumbleUpon, you can watch this one-minute video. Enjoy!