Don’t try to speed up the social bookmarking process
Michael Kwan has been examining a product that helps you automate the process of submitting to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Netscape and Reddit.
The software promises to save you loads of time and it may well do if you currently waste your time submitting all your stories to 6 social media sites.
Using software to submit to Digg or any other site is a stupid idea. The idea behind using these sites is NOT to submit all your stories to them, you need to submit amazing content and then have loads of friends to vote for it otherwise you will get nowhere.
There are loads of people who submit story after story from their own sites to sites like Digg and never hit the homepage. If this is happening to you then you need to stop and try something different. Let your users Digg the stories for you instead.
One thing that is interesting about the software is that you get access to a bookmarking club full of people who can vote for your stories. The main issue I see is that in general the people using this software are likely to be promoting low quality content and if you artificially inflate votes on low quality content a site like Digg will spot it pretty quick and ban all the sites. Not cool.
Sometimes I spend 20 minutes crafting Digg titles, this is not a process I would have any desire to speed up.
Post category: Social Media Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 11 comments below, or add your own!
Hey Patrick, I agree with you on this. And if we submit all our stories, won’t we get banned?
If you submit all your stories and none of them ever get more than a couple Diggs you probably won’t get banned. You might get your site set to auto bury though.
I agree 100% but am a bit disappointed by the fact that one of your RSS sponsors offers to do a very similar thing by posting to forums using Yahoo! Answers content.
My thoughts exactly. I wrote about that Web2Submitter a while ago.
If you have good content, your visitors will submit it, negating the need to do any of it yourself.
Ryan, the RSS feed sponsor doesn’t post to other peoples forums, it only posts to your own forum. It’s designed to kick start your forum rather than a tool to spam other peoples forums.
hi all,
I agree about the idea of avoid to submit all posts, but, when I decide, to speed up the process I use http://socialposter.com that is a simple aid without dangerous tricks.
I disagree that a tool that is used to automate the process of submission such as web2submitter is a tool that is malicious. The tool is not created to assist you in spamming but the tool is created to kick start your blog post. Submitting to a whole but of social bookmarking sites in order to attract a wider spectrum of audience yourself is not malicious nor unethical. Sure if your post is good then the visitor should submit the post, however the description and tags used are as important as the post itself. Who will understand the tags i.e., ‘keywords for these social sites’ and an accurate affective description then you?
A well drawn up description and accurate tagging will give genuine visitors a excerpt of what the post is about filtering all the ‘spam’ and rubbish information that is out there. If you believe you are an authority or an expert and your post is of value to the visitor then by all means push it out there.
hi,
I totally agree with you, most SEO guys think that there is short cuts of SEO campaign. If we use Social networking sites ss informative tool than it help in Every side including Internet marketing.
sam
Hi Patrick.. I ususalyy use Social bookmarking sites to Index my new pages in search engine.. I write a post between 15-20 days… so should I submitt all my posts to social bookmarking or not?
I wouldn’t recommend submitting unless they have a chance to go “hot”.
It is really good.
Thanks