Dig It — There’s More To Social Media Link Building Than Digg

When it comes to leveraging social media marketing for your link building campaigns, it seems that most of us focus on Digg and Digg alone. The problem with this is that you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If for some reason the content doesn’t get popular on Digg, then you’re out of luck, and your campaign is a flop.

Add to the fact that Digg is getting harder by the day for us as marketers to leverage. The reason for this is that Diggers are building up a strong immunity to content built specifically as Diggbait. This is because so many people are trying to use it as a marketing vehicle, most of whom have no idea what they are doing. This results in the site being flooded with poor to mediocre content.

Brain Provost said it best earlier this week:

Now that everyone and their grandmother’s smoking buddies are trying to spam Digg, Reddit, and Netscape into oblivion, I think the opportunity to use that as a reliable factory of linkbuilding has jumped the shark.

While there is still an opportunity for leveraging social sites for linkbait, I see Digg as the one that is slipping away the quickest. Again, this is because it’s the one that just about everyone focuses on, relies on, and even spams.

It understandable why Digg has gained so much attention. It by far offers the best return for your buck when it comes to linkbaiting. While other sites like Netscape, Reddit, and Delicious (to name a few) are still good to leverage, they don’t quite have the bang that Digg does. But this doesn’t mean they should be ignored, because there is still a lot of value in them.

By leveraging all the social news sites, you increase the chance of having a successful campaign overall. If you manage to go viral on these other sites and not Digg, then you will still be able to attract a lot of links. And if this is the case, then by no means is your campaign a failure. After all, success should be measured by links and not whether or not you make the Digg homepage.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for 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.