October 17, 2013: Social recommendation site StumbleUpon.com – unlike flashy competitors such as Tumblr — which made its founders rich through a well-publicized Yahoo acquisition, doesn’t get much press these days. But the site is still alive and webmasters of all stripes continue to report that the site delivers targeted traffic — not in Facebook-sized chunks — but in a steady flow of visitors that are highly desirable, because they have self-selected themselves for conversion.Marketers should pay attention to StumbleUpon because it has real potential to expose one’s brand in a gentle, organic manner. This article tells you how to do it.
Likes, Dislikes, and Page Streams
StumbleUpon isn’t a social network, although it has many social features. It’s a recommendation engine that works its magic in a decidedly low-tech way that doesn’t require users to install a plug-in, bookmarketlet, or other gizmo. People simply sign up, tell the engine what they’re interested in, and the system thereafter produces a stream of pages that other people have found interesting. Like Facebook – StumbleUpon uses “Likes” to determine what users see in their content stream. Each website in the stream is delivered intact, which can make StumbleUpon a bit unpredictable to use, especially on slower machines or connected via sub-FIOS-level networks. But this uneven presentation is more than offset by the serendipitous experience that “Stumblr’s” find pleasurable. Unlike Facebook, StumbleUpon freely uses “Dislikes” to curate the stream of sites. There are multiple ways to “Dislike” a page (“Not For Me,” “Seen Page Before,” “Page Does Not Load,” “Report as SPAM,” and “Block” (anything from a particular domain). Every page viewed in StumbleUpon is curated, crowd-sourced, and filtered, incorporating both positive and negative signals from the larger StumbleUpon audience.
Interest Areas With Commercial Potential
Like Twitter, you can “follow” on StumbleUpon, but you don’t follow people — you follow their areas of interest. There are some 50 popular interest areas listed on the site; they range widely in topic subject — and in marketing potential. For example, most brands will eschew suggesting pages in the Conspiracies (516K followers), Chaos/Complexiy (677K), Paranormal (666K) and Sexual Health (642K), areas.But topics such as Beauty (640K followers), Cars (539K), Fitness (823K) Food/Cooking (942), Nutrition (480K), Nightlife (575K), and Technology (870K) categories might be great places for marketers to introduce messages. Is your CMO quoteworthy? Suggest some nuggets of his/her wisdom to Quotes (1 million followers) – one of StumbleUpon’s most popular areas.
StumbleUpon’s Prime Directive For Marketers
Like Reddit, StumbleUpon isn’t designed to be a commercial marketplace. If you open an account, and begin to add your own pages, make sure these pages offer quality editorial content — not just ads or self-promotional material. You certainly don’t want your pages marked down as “SPAM. “Instead, think of putting together unique pages that highlight what’s beautiful, special, or useful about what your brand offers. You can always include an ad in the stream, after all — StumbleUpon will deliver your site intact, with only the addition of a small horizontal bar across the top of each served page. Give the Web something useful to stumble into and like, and you will benefit from the small but highly engaged stream of traffic that this interesting service can deliver.
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