Sharing stories on social voting and bookmarking sites both grows your social media profile power and enables you to reach your audience. Surprisingly enough, being one of the most important element of the story success, proper tagging is very often overlooked.
Let me first make it clear why you should do at least some research on relevant tagging before sharing the story:
- Relevant tags ensure your story is seen (found) by people interested in the topic;
- Proper targeting ensures your story is voted for, hence you have more chances to get it hot;
- Relevant tags make it less probable you will be attacked by social community trolls (yes, most popular communities do have them).
StumbleUpon has one of the most intricate network of tags and categories – so let me share how to use correct ones: make sure to use tags popular within the community (using relevant keywords isn’t enough).
1. Identify a few main keywords associated with the story;
2. Run Google search for [site:stumbleupon.com keyword];
3. Find SU submissions of the stories on similar topic:
4. Open a couple of them and check if they were popular (StumbleUpon stars are good indicators of popularity):
5. See what tags it was shared in:
You are done! Use these (add yours too!) tags when submitting the story.
Cool, nice tips.
I images are always good :) they add flair to the article.
Wow what a great idea. I’m going to try this out in my next few SU discoveries and see how it works out.
I’m just getting started with StumbleUpon so this information is quite timely. Thanks.
Great article! I never even thought to use SU for seeing whether or not tags in my own blog could be popular!
Great stuff, thanks Ann.
I like that and wondering how it can be done in more easier manner…
I like tips such this one. Creative, Simple, Useful…
Nice tip Ann Smarty… i ill definitely going to try this
Ann,
Great tips. I’m an avid Stumbler, but fairly new so these are perfect for me.
Thanks!
Good one Ann, What about checking it on technorati?
Ann, I want to shout this post out to the world, not possible, but thanks for educating us/everyone!
I have two pet peeves regarding StumbleUpon…
1) Irrelevant tags.
2) Initial Discovery w/o a review.
If we want to do the best for the publisher of the story, we should take the time to help them and others with proper tagging and a short description.
There is a learning curve. However, sharing on StumbleUpon is a mini blog. We should take time to do it right. Thanks for outlining some great tips for proper tagging!
This is a cool hit information for us. Now I know what I’m going to do in Stumble Upon.
I love SU for the rush of views it can generate, but I recently learned that SU preloads the pages, so if you don’t stumble (get) another site the stats for that site show you as a visit, but they never actually viewed your page.
So, SU web stats should be used for general direction of page quality, and not worry about every single visit.
Good stuff. I’m still getting used to SU and this is a good/quick tip that I can implement right now.