What can you say about social networks?

I would like to raise a question about social book sites here! What are your ideas, recommendations and strategies on how to promote a website in social networks like Digg, Delicious and others? Is there any sense to perform website submission to social networking sites and how to get high amounts of traffic as a result? Could you please share your own experience on this matter?

 

I’ve never had any luck with social networking for traffic. Now I’m in the dating niche so that could have something to do with it. It may be different story for other out there, but for me it produced nothing. I personally think all that crap you see about social media , and web 2.0 is a bunch of crap. Please tell me if I’m wrong.

 

Digg & Delicious fall more into the category of Social Bookmarking, even though Digg has a networking feature.

Social Networking sites would include:

http://facebook.com
http://myspace.com
http://linkedin.com
https://orkut.com
http://ning.com
http://tagged.com
http://bebo.com
http://hi5.com
http://friendster.com
http://multiply.com
http://xing.com

As far as social media being crap... the problem with it from a marketing perspective is that it requires you to do all the work to find your customers, whereas SEM allows highly targeted customers to find you. It's use and payoff is more limited than it's advocates make it out to be.

 

Ok, what advices would you provide to succeed in Digg and Delicious?

 

If I were you, I would prefer to post manually for high PR social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious.

With a few bookmarking to these high PR sites, you can easily get your new sites or pages index and ranked by Google within days.

Besides that, consider using some automation software or outsource your social bookmarking for 100+ less authority social bookmarking sites. Even thought these sites have lower PR, it is a great way to build one-way backlinks to your sites.

 

In recent weeks I have had a little better sucess with Digg after I added friends, and they added me and we became mutual friends. Building the network can be instrumental in getting your posts dugg. If they aren't your mutual friend, drop them and find someone else.

 

All of my previous projects seem to have average traffic from digg and delicious. On the other hand, Facebook and Myspace , would be the best choice to produce backlinks to increase traffic , do correct me if i'm wrong.

 

They have worked so/so.

 

Social networks like Digg don't drive a huge amount of traffic unless your Digg article becomes popular. In addition, you can get a high ranking for less competitive search terms for your digg article. Plus, you can also drive up the ranking of the website linked to the article. Often, however less competitve terms don't drive a lot of daily traffic. It takes a huge amount of traffic to make it.

 

I agree with JAsontn- if article doesn't hit FP on digg, there is no traffic. Stumble on the other hand brings good traffic even though not popular..
There are whitelists on Digg (and I assume on SU) and it is very hard for anonymous blog to hit FP. It is possible but it is hard.
I believe social networks are a great tool to bring traffic (if article hits FP) but they are also time consuming. I believe they are also a very good tool for 'branding' - when hitting FP, people add you into RSS feeds and so on...
It also depends what is your target public - if you are into fashion or female stuff , forget about Digg - there is mainly male public (cca 70%). In that case SU is better option.
You need to have good network of friends on Digg (that will digg your stories even though your haven't shouted) so you get into hot section (which is very hard lately cos there is only one hot section - one of the new digg rules...) and then people who are not your freidns digg your story... I wouldn't recommend digg as for newbie it is time consuming - you need to build a portfolio to achieve some soft of success ... besides it is different when you submit livescience or some other whitelisted site and when you submit small blog... in which case hitting Fp is almost mission impossible.... Just look on the digg's FP - all big names there ..