Inside Small Business » 2009

How to Get Friends on any Social Media Network Such as Stumbleupon, Digg, Etc.

Inside Small Business | March 24th, 2009

We are now venturing in a Grey ethical area once we approach this subject. Social networks in their purest forms are intended for the natural interaction of real friends with the opportunity to make more. Any promotion of a piece of media should strictly make its way to popularity on its own merits with no real active attempt of the submitter to “make it popular”. The truth of the matter is that if you have a submission into Digg, for example, it has a slim to no chance of making it popular without some attempt to at least push it to some prominence in the upcoming section. The same to lesser or greater degree can be said for almost all other networks.

If you wish to use social media to promote your work, you face an early decision with respect to this – are you going to pay your dues by developing a network that will support your work because the common element here is that “the other guy” promoting your work without a question will be coming back to you for the same with “no questions asked”. Since this amount of back-scratching is going on, you are somewhat doomed to failure unless you embrace it until such a time as you have a respectable readership that will give natural promotion of your work.

Now that you have addressed that ethical dilemma for yourself, away we go ….

The best analogy for a social media network is walking into a party where you know very few, if any people

If you just sit in the corner, you may get into a conversation but for the most part you will be sitting in the corner holding your drink. So just like a party or other similar social event, you gotta get out there and make a few friends by good old fashioned communication. Lets start by one of the most genuine methods of making friends – using the network the way it is intended. Get out there and look at the media and when you find an entry you like give it an upvote (I will use this as the generic term for promoting a social media submission) and send a message to the submitter with a “Nice find, added you to my friends” or some other acknowledgment. Concurrent with that message send your friend request. You will find a respectable percentage will “friend” you back. When the person “friends” you back, send another message acknowledging this and add the following to your message – “Thanks for friending up and send me anything you want me to look at anytime”. This will let the new friend know that they can send you an article of theirs that they are interested in getting promotion without retribution and that you will probably upvote it.

This is a numbers game in that the more you do, the more you get. The amount of friends you need will be close to whatever votes you observe that is needed to either “go popular” or in a more honest method, enough to propel the article to enough prominence in an upcoming section so that others will at least see it to get “organic” votes. I recommend the latter since your content should carry you to prominence rather than your network but I guarantee there are people who are using the former.

Now before you go spamming your new friends for upvotes you still have some work to do. I covered the method to submit an article to social in another post called How to Submit a post to your social media network. Right now we are still in the mode of making friends on your chosen social network so lets stay in that mode for a while. After all, if you met a guy at a party and after 10 minutes of conversation he tried to sell you a used car without any indication from you that you wanted to buy a car, you might be put off to say the least.

OK, so now you have a few people who are willing to receive communication from you. Next thing is to get to know them a bit. Read their entries, comment on their blogs, profile pages, entries and generate some dialogue with them.You will start to receive personal messages from your new friends to “look” at their submissions. If you decide you want to support this new friends submissions with the understanding that they will help you in the future, upvote the article and send a message back to the person indicating you did support their article. They will remember you for it and you will need them to remember it for the future.

From this point on you keep doing this while consistently increasing you circle of friends and soon you will be ready to show them your work.

*Frank Higgins is a 20 year Silicon Valley veteran having worked initially in his educated field of Laser Physics then moving from there to sales and then on to Software development working primarily with leading Fund management companies and fund management services companies.Approximately 3 years ago he turned his attention to understanding and working with social media from such sites as Digg and Stumbleupon. He joined Leadmarket, an SEO consulting firm to add the benefits of social media content and traffic to compliment the SEO services already supplied.