Connie Rock (@rock_writes) Melissa de Andrade (@MelissdeAndrade) Social Bookmarking & Social News Tools
Dec 28, 2015
Connie Rock (@rock_writes)Melissa de Andrade (@MelissdeAndrade)
Social Bookmarking &Social News Tools
AGENDA
Social bookmarking and social news defined
Tools, tools, tools, and what’s an Alexa rank?
Social bookmarking tool demo: Delicious
Pinterest and corporate marketing
Social Bookmarking
Social News
Social Bookmarking is a way for Internet users to organize, store, manage, share, promote, comment and search for links of resources online
Social News is a type of Social Bookmarking that is dedicated to current news or a specific type of news such as sports or entertainment.
Social Bookmarking and News Tools: Cheat Sheet, Part 1: Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Pinterest, Stumbleupon
Site URL Audience demographics
Classification: Distinguishing Features, Claim to Fame
Year Launched
Alexa global/us traffic rank
Pros Cons
Delicious
www.delicious.com Primarily male, 35-44, graduate school education
Online social bookmarking/link sharing: Pioneered tagging/social bookmarking
2003 399/540 Easy to use, attractive layout, good for visually oriented users
Can’t post custom photos for links & stacks
Digg
www.digg.com
Primarily male, 25-34, some college
Social news: Diggs and Buries, a lot of tech focus. Pages that get lots of diggs are displayed on the Home page.
2004 189/No US rank
Wide variety of articles
Not very visually appealing, top users can quickly sink an article they don’t agree with
www.reddit.com
Primarily male, 18-24, some college
Social news: Votes up or down, stories get promoted to front page based on popularity
2005 115/50 Easy to use Stories and commentary can be quite offbeat and interesting
Not very visually appealing, top users can quickly sink an article they don’t agree with
www.pinterest. com
Primarily female, 25-34, college
Social image sharing: Users create and label theme-based image collections called boards. Can repin, like, and comment on other pins.
2010 129/26 Visually appealing, voted as one of Time Magazine’s top 50 websites
Open beta status: Need invite to join immediately; open sign-up results in being put on a waitlist
Stumble-upon
www.stumbleupon.com/
Primarily female, 18-24, some college
Discovery/ Recommendation engine
2001 125/82 Especially good for traffic generation
No support for Safari
Social Bookmarking and News Tools: Cheat Sheet, Part 2:Trover, Slashdot, Instapaper, Flipboard
Site URL Audience demographics
Classification: Distinguishing Features, Claim to Fame
Year Launched
Alexa global/us traffic rank
Pros Cons
Trover
www.trover.com
Primarily male, 25 – 44, graduate school
Mobile discovery network: Users can share geotagged images with anyone else on the service.
2011 613,217/ 1196,578
Visually appealing, new Lists feature adds personalization and promotes community
Needs to augment feature set to truly distinguish itself
Slashdot
www.slashdot.org Primarily male, 25-34, some college
“News for nerds”: Social news site focused on technology, with heavy emphasis on Linux and open source issues, user-based moderation of discussions
1997 1,730/ 1,010
Good moderation by community, interesting discussions
Trolling, heavy bias toward Linux (not necessarily a con, unless you’re not a Linux fan )
Instapaper
www.instapaper. com
Primarily male, 25-34, graduate school
Social bookmarking (originally online bookmarking, but added social sharing and browsing in March 2011; users can link accounts to share stories)
2008 4,829/ 3,658
Simplicity, over 140 iPhone an diPad apps supporting sending pages to Instapaper using Developer API
Visually dense, old-school UI. some reviewers have had trouble sending stories to their Kindle
www.flipboard. com
Primarily male, 25-34, graduate school
Social magazine; users “flip” through their social networking feeds and feeds from websites that have partnered with Flipboard
2010 19,960/ 14,617
Visually appealing, combines old-school experience of flipping pages with social sharing features
Limited to Apple iPad and iPhone; can’t read stories when offline without an Instapaper account
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.
Source: Alexa. About the Alexa Traffic Rankings (2012). Retrieved February 6, 2012, from http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more
Your own footer
So what the heck is an Alexa rank,
anyway?
Is a social bookmarking tool
Is a link sharing tool
Lets users create, share, and invite contributors to stacks, “playlists for the web.”
Lets users follow, comment on, contribute to others’ stacks, and save stacks to their favorites
Was re-launched by new owners Avos, run by former founders of YouTube
Household Income
• O-15K 19%
• 50-100K 23%
• 100-150K 26%
• 150K+32%
Quantcast
Attracts ~ ½ million
visitors/month
ComScore
Visitor locales:
India: 24.1%
U.S. 17.4%
Pakistan 4.6%
Alexa
Steve Chen,Avos co-founder
Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day… There’s a waterfall of content that you’re
missing out on.There are a lot of services trying to solve the
information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.
What can you do with
Delicious?
Import bookmarksto use as portfolio
Bookmark social
profiles
Curate content
with stacks
Follow stacks
Track backlinks
Sharelinks
Create actiontags
Set up a company
account to share content
links
Is a visual social network
Is a social bookmarking tool
Is a virtual pinboard that allows users to “pin” images they find on the web.
Images are “re-pinned”, shared and “liked”
Pinterest Drives More Referral Traffic Than
Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn Combined
3.6% of referral traffic in January (it was .17% in July)
Shareaholic
11 million visits a week in December 2011
40 times the number of 6 months before Experian Hitwise
User base:3.3 million
Unique visitors increased by 429% from Sep to Dec 2011
Compete
Phyllis Cheung, LuxeFinds.com
I don’t think that every business can benefit from Pinterest’s
traffic. Pinterest is a very visual website – if your business is visual, I would definitely say
to go for it
Example text
3Pins are repinned roughly 50-75 thousand times a week
Example text
2Best moment: gained up to 10,000 followers a day
First Outcomes
1 Clicks through Pinterest started almost immediately
CASE STUDY LuxeFinds.com
Luxury lifestyle search engine for women uses for:
Brand acceptance: pinners constantly
pin their logo
Low bounce rate: picks of
300 page views in one session
RESULTS
SMS1 Million
page views per month after
3 months• Brand exposure after business rebrand and expansion
CEO Phyllis Cheung typically spends about 2-3 hours pinning per day and try to find around a hundred images to pin.
CASE STUDY
Aggregate content and tools that empower your supporters to spread the wordThey have a blog and a Facebook — but Pinterest gives them the opportunity to collect all of those resources in one central location where supporters can easily find and re-share them.
Keep the story aliveAs new pins are added to a board, they appear in followers’ streams, generating likes, comments and re-pins, and keeping followers engaged.
Connect with people and build the communityPeople find content because it’s re-shared by their friends, or by searching on Pinterest around keywords or browsing content channels. Images have a deep ability to inspire action and engage.
Jennifer StaussWindrum, founder
It's a powerful storytelling tool and a good way for non-profits to get their messages out while getting people to talk about their cause
WTF for Lung Cancer
• Develop a line of sock monkeys called SMAC! (Sock Monkeys Against Cancer). They pinned various attributes of the sock monkeys they wanted to design and interacted with others to create them all virtually.
• Build a visual community through the founder Jennifer Strauss Windrum’s “Faces of Lung Cancer” board that shows how the disease affects people of a variety of ages and backgrounds.
Non-profit "WTF (Where's the Funding) for Lung Cancer?" uses for:
PINTEREST FOR NON-PROFITS
Collaboration and product developmentBoards are perfect for collaborate on a prototype or generate helpful tips from users.
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WHY WOULD A BRAND USE PINTEREST?
Give the Brand a Face
Imagery will display how the business is different
and what it stands for
Track Trends
See in what users are interested
Augment SEO strategies
Use the description section to write keyword filled text about the business; name boards that include the business name or
the city where it is located
Sell a Lifestyle, Not Products
Show people using the brand and how their lives are better
because of it
Promote the Brand Image Content
Visual brands may be the ones to mostly benefit from a visual
social network
Pinterest As a Business-to-Business
Marketing Tool
Create a partnership, get on another company’s radar, find a common inspiration to launch a
new campaign together
Monitor the Brand
Search for mentions and images of the brand or its products; also see what’s being pinned related
to competitors
CREATIVE WAYS TO USE PINTEREST FOR MARKETING
Create a User-Generated
Pinboard
Allow other users to contribute their own pins to your hosted pinboards
Great opportunity to involve fans and
customers in your marketing
Use It Like a Focus Group
Look at the pinners who follow your brand — see what they’re pinning and who else they’re following. They’re sharing a lot of information about their interests, passions, dreams and sense of humor
Use this information to your advantage to glean insights about
your target consumers
Crowdsource
Ask fans to pin pictures of themselves with their favorite product of yours and tag you, and then you can easily repin those photos onto a VIP board
Show potential customers that your current users really
like using your product
HOW TO USE PINTEREST?
HOW TO PROMOTE A BRAND’S PRESENCE IN PINTEREST
Launch the Pinterest presence with some kind of promotion such as a contest
Write a blog post
Add the Pinterest follow
button to the website
Follow users that would want to
follow your brand back
Promote your brand’s presence on Pinterest through your other social networks by encouraging followers/
fans on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter to follow
your pins