Digg submit buttons: a good idea?
Lately I've noticed a lot of people using the Digg button in Sociable to submit my posts to Digg. While I appreciate the gesture, the chance of any of my "normal" posts making it to the front page of Digg is minimal.
To make it to the front page, you currently need 200+ diggs. Getting there with anything other than an exceptionally good and well-targeted post, or with a lot of "help" is neigh to impossible.
I was talking to my buddy Chris Winfield of Social Media Marketing firm 10e20 about whether it's bad for a site to be submitted too much, his answer:
It depends on how its done. If it's very obvious spam from the same user, then, yes, it's bad for your site's performance in Digg. If it's natural - then it's no big deal. But it also depends on what type of site it is. If you run a widget factory and somehow everyone of your pages is getting submitted to Digg, natural looking or not - it's no good.
That's why I've taken the Digg button out off my Sociable setup. I'd rather control a bit more what I submit to Digg and what not. Of course it doesn't prevent people from submitting, but making it a bit less easy might actually lower the amount of Digg submissions that have no chance at all of making it to the front page.
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Category: Social Media
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20 Responses to “Digg submit buttons: a good idea?”
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by Karsten on 18 August, 2008 at 11:54
What's wrong with the system when Blog owner have to find ways of not getting submitted to a social network?
That sounds so wrong and I blame Digg not you for this situation ;-)
by Joost de Valk on 18 August, 2008 at 11:56
@Karsten yeah well :)
by Eric Lander on 18 August, 2008 at 18:53
Chris' quote quote of "if it's very obvious spam from the same user" reveals the deeper issue. There is an abundance of boneheads on Digg who only submit their stuff (or, their friends stuff). Digg is more about power users and their actions than it is content owners.
I'm installing Sociable on a few of my blogs today and I'll absolutely pull Digg out of the mix.
by Eljah on 18 August, 2008 at 19:04
Hmmm.. an Interesting standpoint. I was always under the impression that you should be submitting your own posts to Digg to take advantage of possible traffic leaks and backlink opportunities.
i guess I was taught wrong.
by Joost de Valk on 18 August, 2008 at 19:10
@Elijah: I hardly ever submit myself, but I do like to know where and when stuff gets submitted...
by Dave on 18 August, 2008 at 20:10
Found an interesting story about Diggers in my rss feed last week
http://www.invesp.com/blog/social-media/dont-digg-this-the-real-story-behind-digg-top-users.html
Dave
by Jean-Paul Horn on 20 August, 2008 at 06:26
Unfortunately this plugin (Conditional DiggThis Badge) stopped working. I still believe a conditional Digg This badge is the appropriate way for both blog owners and blog readers. I also requested this functionality for this (better maintained) plugin (DiggZ-Et), but alas it hasn't been picked up yet. How about this for a new plugin idea Joost? ;)
by Edwin on 20 August, 2008 at 08:19
I have a dozen of social media submit buttons, up to now nobody uses them. You need to have lost of visitors who are familiar with social media. I recieved one nice backlink from searchallinone (high quality PR5 inbound link).Due to the fact that it was a good resource article, written in dutch but basicly also very usefull for english readers.All 6xx votes came from searchallinone visitors. I doubt it that I'll ever be so lucky again. Even Digg.com homepage articles use a great amount of prefabricated support votes to obtain sufficiant digg's.
by Ramoonus on 21 August, 2008 at 11:06
The problem is that most shared-hosting providers cant coop with the amount of load that`s generated (like my provider) which means most users get very very slow sites, or worse.. errors
the trick of getting on the frontpage of digg is writing another usefull story and give it a useless title and description ... like windows vs linux ... and trust me you get high in the ranking.
by erichansa on 26 August, 2008 at 19:13
very useful idea, but it doen't work well for me. No visitors share stories.
by Terry B on 3 October, 2008 at 19:47
Hi. This may be a little off topic and I apologize, but I'm having trouble uploading and customizing Sociable. I emailed you through the Sociable home page, but in the meantime thought I might try here too. Sociable uploaded okay in my plug-ins, but I can find nowhere to change the icons displayed. Essentially, I want StumbleUpon [which isn't showing up], Technorati [ditto], Digg [sorry!] and Facebook. I'd like to delete the others and make StumbleUpon and Digg show up. Also, I'm using WordPress.org and the Thesis theme from Chris Pearson and hosting my blog on Bluehost. Don't know what effect those have on the functionality. Thanks for any help!
http://www.blue-kitchen.com/