10e20 Blog

Reddit is known best for its wide variety of links submitted to the main site, which allow you to directly click to a new story or picture. Well, there is more to reddit than just thousands of links covering numerous different points of interest. Once you dig deeper down into what reddit has to offer, you will find 8 different communities (also know as a subreddits). Each of these communities consist of a different topic (Politics and Programming are two of the more popular ones) and are there for people who would prefer to only see content that matches those topics. Understanding the subcultures within reddit is an important part of understanding how to be successful on reddit as a whole.

These different subreddits are located on the top right-hand side of reddit.

Clicking on a community will bring up its own reddit page with only links consisting of that topic (each having their own unique alien logo ;)).

Recently, Digg added many new “social” features to the site. Including more personalized profile pages and the ability to shout your friends a cool story or just a short message. This quick post will be looking into the “shouts” feature on digg and how to get the most out of it.

Shout a story
Say you’ve got a story you submitted to digg and you think one of your friends on digg will really like it. Clicking the share button (located under each story) will bring up a screen with all of your digg friends. From there you can pick and choose which users you want to shout the story to.

Those users will then get a notification in their incoming shouts section on their profile page indicating someone has shouted a story to them. But remember, don’t over shout your friends with all of your submission, that is obviously not a good idea

A few weeks ago Chris did a post on Search Engine Land about 6 Content Types That Work on Digg so I decided to follow that up with a quick post about what works on Reddit.

Submitting a story to Reddit is easy, although finding a story that enough people will vote for and like, might be hard. Here is a list a of 6 things that can increase the chances of your story becoming popular.

1. Pictures

If the picture is funny, amusing, interesting or just plain stupid, you would be sure to get tons up votes. How ironic… redditors up voting pictures (but it really does work!).

2. Politics

U.S. politics obviously works best on Reddit (and bashing Bush is always a plus). 57.22% of redditors live in the U.S.

3. Interesting Articles

Asmallworld.net is a social networking site where membership is by invitation only and is intended to have members of only the most elite social spheres around the world.

Would you like to join this network? If so, have your diplomas and financial info at the door folks. Do you have a first home on 5^th Avenue, a second home in Vail, a third Palm Beach and a fourth in Monaco? Are you Ivy League and do you have a Masters or PhD beyond your undergrad credentials? Do you speak a second or third language? Then this may be the online social networking site you’re looking for. Forget about social profile pages dedicated to college bands a la Myspace.com, members of Asmallworld.net will share photos, stories posts and discussions of their own forays into debauchery at Polo matches and exclusive parties for the limited set. All you A-Listers, start emailing your friends so that you can get hooked into an invitation. Of course the A-Listers should be prepared to pay…

The top two social news website, Reddit and Digg have their differences. Even though Digg is more popular, Reddit might have the edge right now due to these four cool features (you might not have known were even there).

What’s Hot Now

Reddit’s main page is a lot different from Digg’s. Reddit’s main page stories are all current stories based on the amount of points it has and the time it was submitted. So, if you submitted a story first thing in the morning and throughout the day it only received 10 points, the chances of it being on the main page at night is very slim, but if the story has 100 point it’s a whole different story. Once your story on Digg reaches the homepage, that story can be moved off the homepage within a couple of hours, due to the ongoing stories reaching the same page as yours. It would be great to see a section on Digg for “what’s hot now.”

Microsoft has approached Facebook in recent weeks and the two companies are in talks about Microsoft making an investment in the social-networking startup. Microsoft’s investment would give them up to 5% in the company and that would value Facebook at $10 billion or more according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft’s approach to Facebook in recent weeks with proposals to invest in the fast-growing site is part of the software giant’s effort to catch up with the Internet rival Google. If successful, Microsoft’s talks with Facebook could give it an up-to-5% stake in the closely-held startup—a stake potentially valued at roughly $300 million to $500 million, the people familiar with those talks said.

The article states that this is likely to lead to another battle with Google, who has also expressed interest in Facebook.

1) Today Digg will be rolling out a major update to make the site into a much more “social” environment. I did a complete write-up on the changes in an article for Search Engine Land. The main enhancements are going to be:

• Increased friend capabilities.
• ”Shouting” and “posting”.
• Enhanced profiles.

Read: Digg to Get Truly “Social” With Major Update Today

2) Netscape Social News is officially dead. Long live Propeller. We talked about this last week and its now official. Netscape has redirected their homepage to netscape.aol.com and the social news site is now live at Propeller. The site looks almost exactly the same (save for the new logo):

Read more about the changes at Netscape’s blog: Propeller lives!

The guys over at 97th Floor have come out with a great new tool called the Social Media for Firefox Extension.

The tool is the the ultimate time saver to building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators etc… is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. The tool lets you quickly see which sites a story hasn’t been submitted to so that you can be the first to submit it.

Building up your social media profile is something we have covered extensively here at 10e20. This tool helps you specifically with this part:

Get really good with breaking news: One of the best ways to get homepage stories before you have a strong profile setup is to be the first to submit breaking news stories. Diggers are really, really fast at breaking news so you have to be armed with your own weapons.

Yesterday Netscape made the official announcement that their social news site (currently at Netscape.com) would be moving to the new domain Propeller.com. This came on the heels of months of speculation and another update last week that they would be moving their ‘Digg clone’ off of the main page and moving back to the portal style site.

So what does this mean for you? To begin with, I think the traffic numbers will decrease (at least in the short-term) as some users make the switch and many move on to other places. Over the past few months we have seen an average of about 2,500 visitors for a typical Netscape front page. But the quality of what is on there right now (this is currently on the homepage with over 100 votes) is really effecting the level of traffic that is visiting. On top of that, there simply aren’t many links built from Netscape stories. I’ve discussed this with a bunch of colleagues and that sounds pretty right on for them as well. Hopefully, they will be able to move this completely out of Netscape and Digg’s shadow and build up a powerful, well trafficked site. I really hope this happens because just like you need alternatives to Google, you need alternatives to Digg.

My new monthly column for Search Engine Land is now up on the site. In it I focus on what types of content work well right now on Digg (what give you the best shot at hitting the homepage). Here’s the short list that I go in to:

1. Lists
2. Videos
3. Images
4. Tools
5. Tips
6. API’s

Delivering content in a way that Diggers like is half the battle to making the Digg homepage. Check out the full article at Search Engine Land where I give examples of each that have worked on Digg and explain how any business can make these work for them.

Six Content Types That Really Grab Diggers’ Attention