Tons of people have been using the Digg shout it feature lately. A shout is a message that can be sent between two or more users on Digg, making it a very powerful tool for getting many people to take notice of content, and potentially garnering lots of Diggs.

Some Digg users consider the shout out feature to be the most effective way to get a story on the Digg homepage. Others, however, feel that it’s nothing more than an easy way to spam others. I personally see it as a very effective feature. Here is how what you need to know to use the feature optimally.

First, grow your Digg user profile to 300 plus mutual friends. The more mutual friends you have the more people you can shout to. If you have fewer than 300 mutual friends the feature is still effective, but your chances of making the homepage decrease.

Before you start shouting, think about the importance of the story you are promoting. Some users will get irritated if you shout too often, which is why you need to use this feature only with your most important stories.

Once you submit a story or someone else submits a story that you want promoted, you need to think about the timing. Timing is very important when shouting because the quicker you get votes, the faster you are going to get to the homepage. I recommend shouting right after a story is submitted—and, more importantly, during working hours, because that is when people browse Digg.

The last step in the process is to start shouting. The easiest way to shout your friends is to shout to all of them at once. The problem with shouting to all your friends at once is that only 100 of them will receive the shout. Digg did this to help prevent spamming and gaming, which is why you need to shout 100 of your friends at a time. I usually shout my first 100 friends, then my second 100 friends, and then my last 100 friends.

If you have not tried the shout it feature I highly recommend doing so. Although some may see it as spam, Digg is the one who created this feature. Moderate use of the shout it feature should not be considered spamming. Yes, abusing it should be considered as spam, but if Digg did not want people to use the feature they would have never released it.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Last week Chris Winfield did a great job reviewing the new Digg. Today, I want to discuss how the changes affect SEOs. We all want to get on the homepage of Digg because it can bring in thousands of links, but the recent changes made it both easier and harder to get stories promoted. Here’s an overview of the changes and what they mean for SEO.

Friends submission page. Other than spamming, the easiest way to get votes was to add tons of friends. By having hundreds of friends, when you submit a story many of your friends vote on it, thus increasing your chances to make the homepage. The reason this worked well in the past was because users could see ALL the stories that their friends submitted. Now Digg limited this feature by showing users only the last 60 stories that were submitted by friends. This makes it harder to get votes from friends unless they are constantly checking up to see if their friends submitted any stories.

Shout it. As Chris mentioned in his post, Digg released a “Shout it” feature. This feature lets you easily send all your friends a story that you submitted, which will help increase the number of votes it receives. There are two things to be careful with when using this feature. The first is that you don’t want to abuse it or your friends may think you are a spammer. The second is that if you have too many friends the feature isn’t currently working. Hopefully Digg will be fix this feature for the users who currently have too many friends, but for now it doesn’t work.

Notifications. Before, if you friended hundreds of Diggers it would be rare to get 10 to 20 percent friending you back. Now you can expect higher ratios because users get notified when others friend them. This should make it easier to build up powerful accounts and get more votes for your submissions.

The bottom line: Getting homepage stories. Taking all these changes into account, if I wanted to get a story on Digg’s homepage, the first thing I would do is to get a non-power user to submit it. This way the number of votes required to get to the homepage won’t be as high due to very few friends voting on that submission. Then I would get tons of power users to promote the story via the shout it feature. Granted, you need to know power users for this to work, but from what little testing I have done you can get stories to the homepage easier and with fewer votes.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of social media sites. Because there are so many it can be difficult to figure out which ones to target. In an ideal world you would target them all but with limited time it’s important to prioritize. If you are wondering which social sites to target, wonder no more because these 5 steps should answer your question:

Step 1: List out the keywords associated with your website. For example, “Search Engine Land” is probably related to: search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, social media, search engine marketing etc.

Step 2: Once you have a list of all the major keywords that are related to your website, go through a list of social media sites, select a number that look promising, visit each and search for all of your keywords.

Step 3: With certain social sites you will get tons of results and with others you will get no results. The sites that have few to no results can be crossed off your list and the sites that have tons of results are probably the sites you want to target.

You are probably looking at the steps above, realizing that there are only three steps I’ve listed so far. The reason is that the first three steps are technically all you need to figure out what social sites are relevant to your website. The final two steps aren’t necessarily needed, but if you want to improve your odds on doing well in the social web I highly recommend them.

Step 4: Before spending time targeting a site, do a check for competition. Chances are your competition is leveraging the social web. Take the time to search for your competitors’ content on the social sites you’ve selected. Instead of looking to see who has stories submitted on these sites, you need to look at who leveraged what social site successfully. By “successfully” I mean that your competition had a story that received enough votes to go popular or to the homepage of the social media site.

Step 5: The final step helps you decide whether to continue submitting to a particular social media site. Visit all those that allow comments, and see if any users offered an opinion about your website. You shouldn’t always take these comments seriously because many will be a joke, but they should give you an idea of what the users of these social websites think about your website.

Once you have done these final two steps you should be able to come up with a smaller list of social sites that you can focus on. If the list is large, be careful not to overdo it by placing twenty social media buttons on your website. If you control where your visitors go you will be more successful.

If your list is small, make sure you don’t spam or get too aggressive when targeting these sites because if you mess-up you will quickly be left without any social sites to leverage.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Back in May, Facebook launched a platform that allowed developers to tap into the Facebook hub itself. The Facebook Platform is a set of resources and tools that enables rapid development of applications for Facebook users. It’s proven wildly popular, and companies are leveraging it to gain thousands if not millions of new visitors to their websites. If you are interested in leveraging the 12th most popular website on the Internet (according to Alexa), here is how you can develop a good Facebook App:

Target your audience

Although many think Facebook is filled with teenagers, it is actually open to people of all ages. It may not seem that way, but Facebook has millions of members, and even though older people make up a small percentage of the user base, they still make up a big number. Before you build an application for Facebook, you need to determine which demographic you want to go after and create something that appeals to them.

Think viral

The best way to get an application popular on Facebook is not to spend thousands of dollars marketing it but rather to create something that is viral. If you can create something that others want to send to their Facebook friends, then you’ll have an application that will be used by millions of people. One good example of this is an application called Zombies, where your goal is to bite as many as your friends and turn them into a Zombie.

Provide value

For someone to use your Facebook application they need to get something out of it. This could be as simple as entertainment or it could be as unique as learning something new. When building an application, don’t just think about how it will benefit you, but instead think about what value you can provide to the user.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

A fatal flaw that I have noticed with some Facebook applications is that they are too complicated. If it takes too much effort to fully utilize an application then don’t expect too many people to use it. One of the main reasons why applications such as iLike are so popular is because the concept—leting you add music to your profile and find your favorite concerts—is simple.

Keep an objective in mind

You can build a great Facebook application that is used by millions of people, but if it doesn’t help you with your business, what’s the point? You can leverage Facebook for branding purposes like Zombies did for RockYou, or you can leverage Facebook as Shelfari used Facebook to increase book sales. Whatever your main objective is, keep that in mind when building an application or else you’ll come out with an application that doesn’t help with your bottom line.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

In the past few weeks I have been hearing more and more people saying that Twitter is useless. For those of you who are not too familiar with Twitter I recommend reading my write-up on the service or better yet creating an account on twitter.com and start diving in. For those of you feel that Twitter is useless and that it drives very little traffic, here is what you are probably doing wrong:

You have too few friends. If you have no friends on Twitter and you continuously twit messages, of course you aren’t going to get any traffic. You need to add friends that you know or that may benefit from your twits. That way when you link to a website, your friends see it and visit it. If they like it, they may consider linking to it from their twitter account or their website.

You need to connect your blog to Twitter. If you have a blog and you are looking to leverage Twitter then you need to add your blog to it. This way every time you make a post it gets sent to all your Twitter friends who can help increase your traffic. Although this sounds obvious, it seems that tons of people don’t do this. There are many ways to link your blog; Twitterfeed is just one you might check out.

You aren’t leveraging your website traffic. You can connect your Twitter profile to your website. That way all your twits appear on your website and others also start following your twits. You’ll be amazed on how this can drastically increase your twitter traffic because some people will not follow your website, but they will follow your twitter profile. Follow Search Engine Land On Twitter provides some tips here, and Twitter offers badges you can put on your site here.

If you think Twitter is useless, I recommend trying these things out. You should see a good increase in traffic. Think of Twitter like a RSS reader where users follow tons of people. If you want to succeed, you need to try to get many people to follow you just like how you want tons of people to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Although many of you Search Engine Land readers are sophisticated when it comes to social media, the majority of the people out there are not. Most people aren’t too familiar with social sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us or even Digg and they don’t know if their content is “worthy” of these websites or not. Here are some insights to help you determine if your content is “worthy” and has a chance of capturing the attention and “votes” of social media users.

Topic

Study the StumbleUpon buzz page, the Del.icio.us popular page and the Digg homepage for a few days. You will notice that the most popular content on those sites consists of either breaking news or resource pieces. If you have a product or a service oriented website and you are trying to get your homepage on these sites, your chances are slim.

Time

Users of social sites are looking for the latest information, so timely content usually ends up dominating the homepages of these sites. If you have something that is great but old, chances are that it will not do well. You either are going to have to try and update it so that it is fresh or come up with something else that appeals to social media users.

Quality

There is nothing wrong with spending ten minutes writing an article and hoping it will do well throughout the social web, but this is very unlikely. You need to put in a lot of effort in order to write a great piece of content because if you don’t, people will be able to tell. It is all about providing value—and in most cases detailed, researched content usually provides more value.

Relevance

Although a social site may have categories in which your content fits perfectly in, it does not mean that the content is right for the site. For example Netscape is mainly politically oriented. The site has other categories, including ones devoted to religion and gay & lesbian topics. Sure, you can submit content to these categories, but you should know that the primary user base on Netscape isn’t interested in those topics. So, if you want your content to succeed, you are going to have to find social sites where users not only accept your content, but also enjoy it.

Demographics

Social media sites attract predominantly male users who are young and not the richest guys out there. If you even want to take it one step further, many are smart (in specific areas), but they don’t have college degrees. If you have content that will perk their interest, then you will do fine. However, if you want to blog on how MIT is a great college, don’t expect to make the homepage.

Overall the easiest way to learn if your content is “worthy” is to participate in these communities. Once you do that you will get the hang of what floats and what sinks. Just be careful when trying to leverage these sites because even if you meet all of the criteria it doesn’t mean your content will succeed throughout the social web.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

During the “Better Ways” panel last week at SMX someone in the audience asked for advice on convincing big corporations to embrace social media marketing. At the time my answer was that there would be a lot of education involved and you should also let them know that you’ll be actively monitoring their reputation to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.

This was a great question. After thinking about this question and reflecting back on the obstacles our agency has had to overcome I have come up with a few more ideas on how you can convince your clients they need social media.

Take baby steps

Many companies don’t understand the power and benefits of social media marketing; therefore they will be hesitant to put any substantial marketing budget towards it. That’s OK though—you don’t need to dive head first into it. Start with something small to show them that social media works. Once you see some good results with something small it will be much easier to convince them to be more aggressive in the future.

Have an internal champion

Having someone on the inside of company that understands and believes in social media can go a long way. Decision makers are much more likely to trust people they know from the inside then some consultant on the outside. Communicate closely with these champions and give them the info they need to help convince their bosses. In return they are likely to let you know what obstacles you might have to face and overcome.

Education

SEO has been around for over ten years, and yet it still takes a lot of education to convince some companies that they need it. Don’t expect social media marketing to be any different. Education will always be a big factor in closing the deal. Make sure you have a deep understanding of the communities where the company will be involved, what type of “return” they can expect, relevant case studies, and good rebuttals for their fears.

Reputation management

Big corporations are afraid of social media and for some companies, rightfully so. By getting involved in social media, companies are loosing control of their brands at some level or another. You need to reassure your client that you will be actively monitoring their reputation to make sure that nothing gets out of control. It’s even better if you can teach someone within the company to do the reputation management themselves. The communication will be much more genuine coming from someone on the inside then it will be from you on the outside. You also need to make sure that you have a clear understanding of the client’s brand perception and that you don’t put them in situations where they can get in trouble.

Social media marketing is still in its infancy and convincing clients to do it isn’t an easy task. These are just a few of things that have helped us convince companies to get onboard. What are some things that have worked for you?

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Marketers generally create landing pages for pay-per-click campaigns or other advertising campaigns. So, why not create them for social media sites? Granted, it may seem impossible because it is hard to change the layout of your blog or website just for visitors from like Digg, Netscape, and StumbleUpon. However, you can make it so that if a visitor came from a social site, they would see a different design.

Let’s take Search Engine Land as an example to explore this possibility. Here are things from the current design that you might remove for any visitor coming from a social media site:

1. Advertisements

Visitors from social media sites generally hate advertisements. They usually aren’t going to click on them either, so there is no point in having them unless you have CPM-based advertisements. By not showing ads to social media visitors, it will also seem like you aren’t making money, which is usually good, because many of these visitors don’t like websites making money off of “their” traffic.

2. Navigation

All the items in the sidebar should be removed because it can cause users to navigate your whole site or other sites that you link to. The last thing you want these visitors to do is navigate your site and possibly find something they don’t like, which would decrease the chances of your site doing well on social sites. You also don’t want to link to other sites because they may leave your site and then forget to vote for your story.

3. Social Media Buttons

There is nothing wrong with placing social media buttons on your site so your visitors vote for your stories, but you don’t want to show them off to visitors that come to your site from a social site. Some may feel you only care for traffic, or that you may care for other social sites and not the one they use. A lot of these visitors are loyal and don’t like social sites that they don’t use.

4. Sponsored Links

Paid text links are usually affiliated with SEO and some social media visitors may feel your site supports Internet spam. [Editor's Note: Our sponsored links use nofollow for search engines that don't get the JavaScript-based unit, meaning they are within search engine guidelines -- not that, as I explained in Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?, that anyone can easily tell the "good" paid links from the "bad" ones].

The Social Media Visitor-Friendly Site

Here’s a screenshot of new design just for social media visitors:

All of the marked boxes in the first screenshot were removed form this screenshot, plus I added one more element, marked 6, and outlined in red.

This element has pictures of the Macintosh and Firefox logos because many social site users love these products and services. By adding them, you are appealing to them, which may cause them to vote on your story.

You don’t want to necessarily use the social media design for all of your visitors, but if you really want to maximize your website for visitors from social websites, you may want to display a different design for them. Test it out; you will see a world of difference. I am not advocating that you deceive your visitors. You should just find ways to make them feel comfortable, and ultimately your content speaks for itself.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Netscape. You often hear it mentioned alongside Digg as a social media site, but how many of us actually use the service? Some say it is worthless, while others say it is very useful. From being on Netscape a dozen or so times, here’s what I’ve learned.

Timing

Just like Digg, you have 24 hours to make the homepage. The difference is that after 24 hours, a story is removed from the listing pages on Netscape. This means that when a story is submitted to Netscape, it will only get traffic from Netscape for a period of 24 hours on any of the major listing pages.

Homepage

The homepage of Netscape works a bit differently than most social sites. Like Reddit, you have to work your way to the top of the homepage, which means your story may not hit the very top. The way that Netscape is different is that they control how many stories from each category make the homepage. That’s why you will never see 15 political stories hit the homepage at the same time.

If your story gets to the homepage towards the end of its lifetime, it probably will not hit the top, and you won’t get much traffic at all — in most cases, well under 1,000 visitors. On the other hand, if you have a very popular story that gets to the top of the homepage in an hour, it most likely will stay there for another 23 hours. That can mean thousands of visitors.

Audience

The majority of users on Netscape are more sophisticated than Digg users. Not necessarily when it comes to technology, but they are interested in politics and news. For this reason, political and educational stories tend to do better. Netscape users still enjoy technology, humor, science, entertainment and other topics, but those categories don’t send as much traffic.

Links

The reason why the majority of us try to leverage social sites is because of the links. We hope that they will drive thousands of visitors to our site and hopefully a few of those visitors will actually link to our site. By getting on the homepage of Netscape, you get a nice temporary PageRank 9 link. However, the majority of Netscape visitors themselves will not link unless it is something that they are interested in, such as politics.

Conclusion

If you think if you can get content to the homepage of Netscape that the audience will enjoy, then you should try and leverage it, because chances are that you will get a few links out of it. If you are submitting stories that don’t have a chance to get high up on the homepage, then don’t waste your time.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

We all know that getting on the homepage of social media sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Netscape can drive tons of links and traffic, which is why we try and leverage these social sites on a regular basis. But are you leveraging them fully?

Below, some tips not to overlook, such as the importance of good post titles to encourage relevant anchor text, the need to keep content concise, pushing your feed URL and content being king.

Good Post Titles

SEOs know that the titles of their articles should contain the terms they want to be found for. But those titles might not be the most attractive to visitors at social media sites. That’s OK. Your submission to sites like Digg doesn’t have to use the same exact title of your article. However, you still want your submission to make use of the key terms you want to be found for. That helps ensure those seeing your article via these sites might link to you using those titles — and thus getting your key terms in anchor text, which helps with rankings.

Example: Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz wrote the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. The post did very well on social sites such as Del.icio.us, and because of the post title, he now ranks high on Google for the phrase search engine optimization.

Keep It Concise

Social media visitors in most cases don’t like reading a lot content. Because of this, you want your content to be easy to read, short and to the point. Make sure your introductory paragraph is enticing enough to get people to read the rest of your material. By doing this, you will get more people to read and like your content, thus increasing the chance that they actually link to it.

Example: Brian Provost wrote a simple article called How To Generate Targeted Site Traffic Without Search Engines and it received over 900 links after getting on Digg.

Push The Feed

Visitors from social media sites probably will not click on ads or purchase products, but that doesn’t mean they are useless. One way to get them to keep on coming back to your website is to place a big RSS button in their faces. By doing this, some will subscribe to your site, which will also cause some of them to submit future content from your site to these social sites. The other great thing about RSS is that you could place ads within your RSS feeds, which is one way to make more money.

Example: John Chow has been on social media sites like Digg dozens of time, which has helped him get over 300,000 pageviews, 4,000 RSS subscribers, and $8,500 in monthly revenue.

Content is King

Content, content, content. The more you have, the better chances you may have of getting traffic. Social media users love to give input through comments, but tons of websites or blogs make it difficult to comment. Don’t require users to sign-in, and don’t place any other barriers that may stop them from participating. Instead, invite them to give their input by baiting them at the end of your content. [Editors Note: Yes, we require sign-in here against Neil's advice. We understand the trade-off this causes in terms of potential comments. More on that is covered here].

Example: I wrote a simple article on Google’s Growing List of Domains which encouraged comments, and it ended up receiving 168 of them after getting on a few social sites.

These are just some of the ways I know of leveraging social media traffic. What other ways have you found effective?

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

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