For years now, it has been a commonality for social media sites to rate content and commentary on a sliding scale. Sites like YouTube and Yelp allow users to rate and review content on a five-point scale, while sites like StumbleUpon and BuzzFeed want to just know if you like it or not.

Scaled ratings

Historically, stars have represented a scale of ratings on popular sites such as YouTube. People give five stars to videos they love and a single star to videos they dislike. YouTube has now revealed how rare it is to receive feedback from anything in the middle. In a recent blog post, they shared recent studies that display the skewed findings. Below is a graph of which star ratings are the most popular:

As you can see, it is very rare for anyone to provide feedback in the middle. Apple’s App Store also faces a similar conundrum.

The five-point scale seems to be too restrictive and allows for little nuance while a percentage scaled, based out of 100, seems to be too large. Usually, scores almost never fall below 50%, because most people innately think of education scoring and its 90 = A, 80 = B scheme when using 100 percentage scales.

The the 10 point scale seems most ideal. It provides enough room to make important distinctions, but not so much room it throws off the accuracy of the scale. However, let’s explore boolean ratings a bit.

Boolean Ratings

A boolean rating is defined by a simple “yes/no” standard. Most social voting sites follow this standard. If you don’t like the content, you vote it down or bury it while thumbing up or voting content you do like. StumbleUpon and Digg.com have taken this a step further by trying to understand why you are voting down the content. They allow you to select if you are burying or thumbing down the content because it is spam, content you dislike, duplicate content, etc. This additional information gives their algorithms a better feel for why it wasn’t well received.

Judging by the behavior of most users on the five-point rating system, the natural conclusion would be to rid any scaled rating systems with boolean voting. This creates a problem for people not wanting to give a full thumbs up or vote for some minuscule reason. So maybe adding a way to vote in the middle, with a sideways thumb, half-vote, or something similar should solve all the world’s problems at that point, right?

Feedback What do you, as social media users, feel is a good metric for rating content?

Facebook Fan Pages are gaining popularity due to their high adoption rates among Facebook’s 300+ million users. Currently more than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day. However, the basic fan page layout is quite cookie cutter, so adding some simple modifications can really make a Fan Page standout and land those valuable fans. Not only will this look great, but it is easy and cost effective, unlike a custom built and branded Facebook Application.

The average Facebook Page would look like the following:

The main features are the different tabs (called ‘boxes’) that make up the overall look of the page. The standard items on each Facebook Page are “Wall” and “Info” while popular applications (show up in separate tabs) and “Photos,” “Discussions,” “Videos,” and “Notes.”

What all of these items are lacking – is the ability to modify a page so that the visual appearance could match that of your website, promotional material or landing page. One simple application can add this functionality to your pages and pull in Facebook statistics as well.

The application Static FBML will allow you to create a new tab on your Facebook Page that can be completely customized to mimic your web presence by displaying HTML and FBML so that you can render a truly customized section for your fans. Here is a step-by-step look at how you can implement this tactic.

First, you must have an active Facebook Page that you have admin access to. Then, head over to the Static FMBL Page and choose the “Add To My Page” link:

Once clicked, you will have the ability to choose a page (or pages) that you can add this application to. The application will then be added to the chosen Page(s) and will be labeled “FBML.”

Next, you will want to click “edit your page” then choose to edit the “FBML – FBML” application.

This is where the magic happens and the customization occurs. You can use simple HTML to fill this page and really have it stand out from your competition. An important note is that javascript is not supported, so just stick with plain old HTML for best results.

There is also a good deal of helpful conversations which can enhance your troubleshooting within the “Discussions”  box of the FBML Page if you get stuck.  Sunkist has a great example of a customized FBML Page for their “Sunkist Team” if you are looking for a few creative ideas.

Now, you should have your customized look in the newly named box … but you are not done yet! If your newly created page is really important for your brand (timely promotion, special savings or just an all around improvement from your wall) you can set this new box as your default location that users will arrive on when they visit your site.

If you choose to do this, simply edit your “Wall Settings” and select your new box in the “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else:” drop down tab.

That’s it! With these simple steps, hopefully you can truly step up the presence of your Facebook Page and differentiate yourself from the pack.  This method should be not only be a cheap way to achieve a customized look, but should also be extremely easy!

Whenever I talk with new clients about social media initiatives, one of the key points is having a social media plan or strategy. Social media is a time and resource intensive effort, and if you spend the time up front developing a plan, you can distribute the work and make the overall project more effective in the long run. In this column, I’d like to take a look at how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (aka NASA) tackles social media.

Everyone has social media channels that they prefer to use, and by creating a social media hub with links to all of the social media areas they participate in, it makes it easy for end users, and search engines to discover them. Another interesting and noteworthy point, is that NASA has chosen to divide content into different channels, by mission. For example, there is a Facebook Channel for the Ares I-X program, a Flickr channel , a Twitter channel, and a YouTube channel. What this does is give them the flexibility to cross-post the best content. The best photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube were cross-posted into the Facebook account. But the Facebook account has other pictures that aren’t in the Flickr account. There’s overlap, but each channel has unique content or value add.

Another sticking point that many organizations face when engaging in social media is controlling the message. Many organizations favor a top down, tightly controlled, output of information. In fact, the NFL and Dreamworks Animation are inserting clauses and restrictions on Twitter usage for employees. In a recent interview about how NASA uses Twitter, it was revealed there are over 100 NASA employees using Twitter. While there isn’t an official policy in place, they do ask everyone to abide by their “release of government information guidelines” when using social media.

To get the most out of social media, it’s important for information be released in a timely fashion. Creating bottlenecks of very small groups of people who are allowed to publish/approve will limit your success. Instead, set up some ground rules, and let everyone who agrees to abide by them to publish freely. When you do, you end up with interesting and unexpected results, like this TwitPic of a spent rocket booster from the Ares X-1 launch bobbing in the ocean waiting to be recovered.

Here are some takeaways that you can put into action after looking at NASA’s strategy:

• Create accounts for each different type of platform (blogging, microblogging, pictures, and video). You may never use that service/content, but if you decide to, it’s good to already have an account in place.
• Unless one service offers an advantage which matches your vertical market, choose the most popular service.
• Be aware of market trends and shift accordingly, 2 years ago having a mySpace page was important, today it’s more important to be on Twitter and Facebook.
• Give each channel its own unique content, and cross promote the best of each channel. The best pictures and videos, should always make it into your blog, Facebook page and Twitter stream.
• Information wants to be free, set up basic guidelines of what is and isn’t acceptable with your employees, and subcontractors. Don’t require anyone to become involved, but as long as it doesn’t interfere with their job, allow and encourage engagement.

Since its invention towards the end of the 20th century, the Internet has changed a great many things. And one of the things that is has done time after time is dismantle business models that had seemed, until its arrival, absolutely rock solid. From music to publishing to TV, the Internet has swept away seeming certainties and replaced them with doubt and uncertainty.

Whilst this fact can not be argued with, the common perception that the reason these media models have been so badly damaged is due to the rise of UGC is, like so many ‘commonly held facts’, actually untrue. The reason these businesses face ruin is that their old models simply can’t be upheld in the face of a fragmenting consumer base and advertising dollars that are increasingly being asked to pay for everything.

The reason I say this, is that if you actually look at the content people are consuming, it’s still overwhelmingly content that has been professionally produced; it’s just that there isn’t enough money to pay for this production anymore.

Earlier this year, the video tracking firm Visible Measures released a chart of the videos that had managed to amass more than 100 million views apiece. In the commentary, they claimed that the list included:

older and newer campaigns, and includes music videos, movie trailers, user-generated spots, and clips from TV shows.

Now this is true, up to a point. Of the top 20, only 2 were actually user-generated content: “Charlie Bit My Finger Again” & “Numa Numa”. Visible Measures claimed that 2 others were also UGC, but “Achmed The Terrorist” is a consumer’s video of a professional comedian performing on stage, whilst Rick Astley was originally a professional musician. Users may have made them popular, but they didn’t make the content.

This is an interesting trend for brands, for whilst ‘traditional’ media companies now struggle to finance the sort of content that they did in the last century (hence, NBC’s recent decision to put the relatively cheap Jay Leno show up against big budget dramas), brands can start to step into the breach.

As the rise of social media appears to make it harder than ever for brands to find ways to gain consumer’s attention, being able to fund content that can then start conversations means that they suddenly have a reason to be part of their customers’ lives. To paraphrase the old mantra of search:

Conversation is king; content is just something to talk about

This means that brands can start to capitalize on sponsorship opportunities by using the web, and particularly social media, to give fans a look behind the scenes, whether by organizing Facebook chats with football stars or inviting bloggers to cover big events. They can mobilize music fans and find a way to talk to them, as mobile company Orange has done in the UK. They can look to generate their very own water-cooler moments that chime with their brand’s essence, in the way that Unilever did in the US with In The Motherhood, a series of online shows that started on MSN before moving to ABC, or they can give time-poor mothers fairy-tale podcasts to play to their kids, as Kleenex did in the UK*.

Interestingly, the reason In The Motherhood didn’t fare as well on TV as it did online is that the Writer’s Guild Of America were unwilling to allow viewers to suggest their own stories – really there’s no need for UGC to try to kill traditional media when it is doing such a good job of it on its own.

So next time someone tells you that UGC is about to take over the world, or that their brand has no way of talking to consumers, why not tell them a story about the stories their brand could tell that people really want to hear.

*Disclosure: In The Motherhood was produced by Mindshare whilst the Kleenex podcasts were produced by Mindshare & Altogether, my current & previous employers.

BedTime stories image by Playingwithbrushes on flickr

In social news and social bookmarking sites, many users tend to get caught up in how many votes or bookmarks it will take for their submitted content to be promoted to the frontpage or “popular” sections of the site. What is often overlooked by users is the quality and naturalism of those votes that trigger the algorithms to promote that particular piece of content on individual social news and social bookmarking sites.

Seeking quality votes and bookmarks is comparable to seeking quality links in search engine optimization (SEO). A wise SEO will focus on the quality of links in the site’s link profile over the quantity of links. The key is building an image of trust to the eyes of the algorithm.

Often, social media users will be propositioned by other users on that network to vote or bookmark content they have submitted in attempt to promote that content to the frontpage. The original user will provide you a link to the voting page on the social media site, you vote, and then get back to your busy day. This is also known as a “blind vote” which defines a person blindly voting for particular content without viewing it. The issue in this scenario is that the vote you just gave to that content is not weighed very heavily and thus considered a low-quality vote.

With social media sites having their own framed bars for content now (e.g. Digg, StumbleUpon) they are able to measure the level of engagement on the actual content page. This opens up a whole new area for detecting naturalism within social media voting. Reasons why a vote might be considered unnatural or low-quality include:

• There is no click-through to view the content.
• There is little time spent on the page. (Average time expectations depend on type and length of content.)
• There is no engagement on the content page itself. (No scrolling, playing videos, clicking through slideshow, leaving comments, sharing, etc)

There is also the issue of how you arrived to the content. Coming straight to a voting page or an ‘upcoming’ page on a social media site, with no referring URL, likely means you came from a direct link via an IM or e-mail. While a shared URL isn’t a bad thing, it might be if the vast majority of your votes only come from that methodology. A way to gain a natural high-quality vote is to have the user start at the homepage of the site and perform actions to naturally find your content to vote on. That could be drilling down to the category or subcategory of your content and clicking on it, performing a site search for a keyword in your title, going to your profile and viewing your submitted content.

It’s important to note and keep in mind that if you are viewing a page that’s framed in a Digg bar and decide you want to thumb it from your StumbleUpon toolbar, you must first close out that Digg bar to get to the natural URL. At that point, the naturalism needs to begin all over again because StumbleUpon has just barely recognized you are viewing the content and doesn’t know you’ve previously been viewing it in another frame.

It’s not only pertinent to know how to receive natural votes, but there’s also a high level of importance in knowing how to give them. If you have a profile that’s always providing natural high-quality votes then your profile will tend to be trusted more when submitting your own content on that site. Avoiding any redflag that might indicate you partake in or organize manipulated voting for content can cause damage to your profile, and even the domains you might frequently submit.

Conclusion

Take it from someone who’s burned their fair share of social profiles in the past, that trying to get votes or give votes in a quick and easy fashion is not the best route to go when desiring long-term success with your profile and content promotion.

Have a Facebook page or creating a new one? Do yourself a favor and be proactive in setting your page up, so users can find you when they are looking. Too often, companies and brands don’t take the proper steps to be found and have to make adjustments in order to show in Facebook search. Whether you are setting up your first page, or tweaking an old one,  the following tips can help you rise to the top of the search results.

Use your brand for your Facebook page name

When naming your Facebook page, you only have one shot at giving it a “name.”  This is what shows up as the title of the page and is created when first setting a page up. This is currently the largest indicator for Facebook search and is make or break for your page being found.

While it might seem simple that you would choose your brand name, it is not always cut and dry.  For example, let’s say we are making a fan page for Search Engine Land. Many times people could create the page with the name titled “SearchEngineLand.com” which would severely handicap your chances of being shown in Facebook search. Similarly, you should keep it simple and not get fancy with the name. Say that the NFL wanted to create a fan page. Well, instead of registering the “National Football League” keyword research should be done to see if “NFL” garners more interest. Don’t try to get cutesy with the naming of pages (like “Comcast Cares”) and make sure you use spaces and full words. While something like SouthwestAir would work for Twitter, you would rather have “Southwest Airlines” for being found in Facebook search in order for maximum visibility.

Build your following

If the Facebook page name is top criteria for being found in Facebook search, the fan count is second place. At SMX East in the Facebook Marketing Panel, Marty Weintraub really stressed this fact and couldn’t emphasize enough how important fan numbers (or group or application numbers) were for being found in the Facebook search results pages. If you have the same name as other pages (which is a common occurrence), the page with more followers should show up first.

Leverage Facebook Ads to help build a following as advertising your pages can help boost fans of your page. You can also leverage employee profiles or groups that you are a part of to really help boost your group numbers.

Create a branded Facebook username

While this may not play a major role in being found within the internal Facebook search, the URL structure can play an important role in getting ranked in the major search engine results pages.  Being found within these pages can clearly help to boost your fan following from those who may be searching outside of Facebook. While we have not seen a direct correlation between usernames and internal Facebook rankings, having a keyword rich username could an indicator in the future and would be considered best practice.

Create fresh content regularly

Wall posts, events and “posts by everyone” can now be displayed in Facebook Search. By creating regularly updated content, you will significantly increase your chances for being shown.  Simple wall posts with branded keywords or branded events will give you extra visibility in the new real time Facebook Search.

Leverage domain equity to boost Facebook pages in SERPs

Again, this is a bit of a secondary tactic, but providing a link from your homepage to your Facebook page should help to get your Facebook page ranking for branded terms.  Think of it as proactive reputation management for your brand. Getting people to your page via Google, Yahoo! or Bing can really boost up those fans to your page thereby trickling down to those Facebook Search ranking factors.

Advertise on branded “interests”

While this won’t boost you into the natural Facebook search results, this will allow you to show up on selected terms. While Facebook ads still run off of “interests” rather than keywords, bidding solely on extremely targeted interests, you can boost your possibility of being found. In addition, Facebook does run select Microsoft-network ads, so advertising in adCenter could help you sneak in and steal some of that Facebook search traffic (if you know what you are doing).

Fill in all information about your brand/company

Whether it be the information boxes, mission statements, website or descriptions these could be indicators down the road. While the information isn’t currently helping your pages show in Facebook results pages, it can also help those pages in external Search Engines as most page content is indexed. The more relevant the content, the better. While these sections might not play a role in internal Facebook ranking, there is evidence that it can help the ranking of groups.  This could be applied to pages in the future (and should IMO).

Spend a little time optimizing your site for bing

If you need one reason to pay attention to Bing, it could be for the sole fact that it displays the web results in Facebook Pages. You will always find those web results at the bottom of the Facebook Search, so spend a little time working your site for Bing and you could see a big payoff from the Facebook search platform.

These tips should help your visibility in Facebook search and help to take your fan page to new heights!

As we are on the verge of the fourth quarter, a make or break time for many merchants and retailers, I decided to take a look at how some large and small merchants and retailers are using twitter.

BestBuy

BestBuy has a multi-pronged approach, the main account @BestBuy provides interaction for BestBuy’s employees. A secondary account @Twelpforce (which stands for Twitter Help Force) is geared towards helping customers with technical problems and issues. Another account, @GeekSquad focuses just on computer support for customers.

The thing that’s missing from this strategy, however, is a pure sales channel. BestBuy puts a lot of resources behind the sales flyers and promotional catalogs you get with your Sunday paper every week. There are certainly ways to leverage those promotions in conjunction with Twitter. While there is a @BestBuy_Outlet account, it has limited quantities of products available.

Another opportunity I think BestBuy is missing out on is by not capitalizing on the vanity account name. The account @BestBuy is going to be where most people who might be interested in BestBuy will start to look, if they see it’s an employee centric account, they might not dig deeper. In my opinion, BestBuy should use the main account as a public facing account, have a dedicated account for sales/specials, and relocate the employee account to another name.

When many people hear multiple accounts, they assume this means an increase in time and resources you need to devote to twitter. This simply isn’t the case anymore. There are tools that allow you to manage multiple accounts from one interface like Easytweets, TweetDeck, and HootSuite, which make switching from one account a single painless mouseclick. If you do decide to use multiple employees, a product like CoTweet can help you do it more effectively.

Toys R Us

It’s rare to find an account that can blend promotions with customer and community engagement and keep it balanced, but @ToysRUs is one of them. Another interesting thing that this account does is distribute links to online only and offline only coupons. This works because ToysRUs has a large number of locations, and it gives them the ability to track how effective Twitter is for them.

At first glance, this would seem to be a very active account with multiple tweets per day, however what they are really doing is leveraging content from the blog at Toys.com which automatically posts to the twitter account. As long as you write your blog posts knowing they will turn into individual tweets, and schedule your posts for “prime time” (9 to 5, when people should be working) it can be very effective.

One of the criticisms many merchants have about using Twitter as a sales channel, is everyone is looking for discounts or deals. While that can be attributed partially to the anemic economic rebound, that is a fair criticism. If as a merchant or retailer, you aren’t prepared to offer discounts, sales, or other preferential pricing you will probably have a lot of difficulty making Twitter contribute to your bottom line.

For merchants who are willing to offer discounts there is substantial audience. For example, @CouponTweet which launched early this year is approaching 25,000 followers, and there are other accounts related to coupons with thousands of followers as well.

If you’re a merchant or retailer and are looking to engage on Twitter, or have an existing account and are looking to get more value out of here are some tips:

• Decide if you are going to go with a single or multiple account strategy. Try to gauge the amount of interest for different channels when making your decision.
• Look for ways to engage directly with your existing followers, or the followers of related, and similar companies. Not every tweet should have commercial intent.
• Look for opportunities to leverage your existing content into your Twitter account. Your Twitter account should have some unique elements but it’s, OK to mix in your blog posts or other content.
• Tweet when you have the opportunity to reach the most followers. Not everyone is in your time zone, so you can tweet more than once per day.
• Track your Twitter promotions with landing pages, tracking URL’s, coupon codes and cookies.

One of the greatest marketing success stories of the last couple of years has been Cadbury, the British chocolate maker – which, at nearly 200 years old, could be forgiven for failing to grasp modern technologies to promote its brands.

However, helped by some great creative work by London shop Fallon, they’ve had huge success by creating ads that people love to share. First there was The Gorilla, which racked up millions of views and countless Facebook groups on its way to driving up sales by 9%, as well as a number of interesting spoofs, including a memorable one for Wonderbra which you might not want to watch at work.

More recently there was Eyebrows – which, despite its very bizarre subject matter, has managed to acquire over 4 million views and was a fixture on most viral video charts for months, both in the UK & the rest of the world (particularly the US). Meanwhile, the accompanying Facebook page has over quarter of a million fans and is still generating user interaction, months after the ad was released.

And now, the latest Cadbury ad shows a giant head zooming round a town in Ghana, whilst the locals dance to a track being performed by local rapper Tinny (who appears out of a magic cocoa bean, obviously). The ad is to promote Cadbury’s use of fair-trade cocoa beans and the song that soundtracks it is to be released on iTunes, with all proceeds going to charity. It will undoubtedly prove to be a social smash, just as its predecessors were.

So does this mean that Cadbury is the perfect example of a social media marketer, no longer beholden to old, interruptive forms of advertising? Well, not exactly.

Whilst Gorilla may have become a viral sensation, it was first aired during the finale of the eight series of Big Brother, at a time when the show could still command approximately 14% of the UK population. So much for long-tail seeding. A specially adapted version was also shown before the 2007 Rugby World Cup final between England & France – another program with a pretty sizable audience. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to spur England on to a second World Cup victory.

Like Gorilla, the Eyebrow ad was also backed by high-impact TV slots, as well as a major digital campaign, including prominent campaigns with MSN & Photobox. And Zingolo, the new dancing cocoa bean video, is being advertised on everything from YouTube to bus-shelters in Dublin.

This isn’t to suggest that Cadbury’s success should in any way be lessened, or that they haven’t set out to create fantastic ads that act as entertainment content, perfect for social sharing. In fact, it shows that rather than a naive reliance on consumers spreading a message, Cadbury and their marketing partners, understand that in these days of earned media, paid media still has an important role to play.

For social news and bookmarking services, 2009 has really been the tale of the customized URL shortener. Each of the three largest social sites (Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com) have implemented a URL shortening service that helps users of the site participate. Here is a breakdown of the three tools.

DiggURL

Digg’s version of a URL shortener not only shortens the link, but also frames the content with a ‘DiggBar’ that allows users to perform various actions. The DiggURL has seen a variety of changes in its short career. At first, everyone was shown the DiggBar when using a DiggURL,and a big hullabaloo arose, so the execution was changed. Digg then programmed the DiggBar to only be seen by those users that are currently logged into Digg and opt to view the service.  Since then, Digg has reverted back to the original execution and is showing it to all users, logged in or not.

How to use DiggURL

If the story has already been submitted to Digg, simply click the share button underneath the article link and the shortened address will appear. If you are looking for an easier way to do this (without submitting to Digg), simply add a “digg.com/” in front of any URL and the link will automatically be shortened. This method will allow you do shorten the URL from any webpage.

What are the benefits?

Digg users who are logged in (and chose to view the DiggBar) can vote on stories directly from the bar. In addition, users can see related stories, view comments (most dugg comment, most recent comment and most controversial comment) or randomly browse in a StumbleUpon-esque format. Another feature of the DiggBar is to share via email, Twitter or Facebook – right from the bar. At the moment, the only metric for tracking is a generic “views” statistic that is shown to anyone who sees the DiggBar.

Su.pr by StumbleUpon

Recently out of beta, su.pr is the URL shortener for StumbleUpon and has a variety of features. This shortener will frame the page and display a toolbar at the top of the page for all users.

How to use it

Go to su.pr and either sign up for an account (recommended if you are looking for advanced tracking) or simply enter in an address that you would like shortened. Then, take that URL and share away!

What are the benefits of Su.pr?

Each user is sent the framed article, and they can easily vote on content without having to install and use the traditional StumbleUpon browser-based toolbar. In addition to voting, you can share with your friends, review the page, post to Facebook or Twitter – or simply ‘stumble’ around other sites that have been submitted to StumbleUpon.

Most notably, Su.pr’s tracking is the best in show out of all current Social News/Bookmarking sites if you sign up for an account. You can track traffic, clicks, referrers, Stumbles, and retweets all in a very appealing visual format. Another new feature allows you to use your own URL ,but still utilize the su.pr interface on Wordpress blogs that run on PHP 5.  A simple plugin will do the trick and you won’t be tied to the su.pr domain for your links.

Reddit

Many people do not know that you can shorten Reddit URLs, as their launch was soft and gained nowhere near the attention that Digg enjoyed. This shortener will frame the content and any user that clicks the link will be served a small Reddit bar in the top of the screen.

How to use Reddit as a URL shortener

Much like the DiggURL, simply toss a “reddit.com/” in front of your URL and you will have a Reddit shortened link created.

What are the benefits?

The Reddit bar allows visitors to vote on the article, view a sample of the comments from any given story or visit a random story on Reddit.  The toolbar is very minimal, but does give users all they need to quickly vote on the story and be on their way.

Choosing the best shortener

To find out what shortener (if any) would work for you, see what sites you have had success on by checking your analytics and searching around on the various sites. These social URLs are not for everyone, but if used properly, you can help to give your content a significant boost in traffic.

Editor’s Note: See also our URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? which looks at URL shorteners and what to consider independently of social media issues, such as URL longevity and potential issues with framing.

When you’ve spent a lot of time and money fine-tuning content, coming up with the best headline and description and sprucing up imagery and design, the last thing you want to do is promote content at an off-time when few people are listening.

A big challenge with social media is to break through the information overload that most people experience with updates and piles of content constantly flowing through their various communication channels. With such a high velocity of information flowing people are typically not spending much time going back to see what they’ve missed since they last visited. If your content isn’t near the top of the pile when someone logs into a social news site, there’s a high chance they won’t look back far enough to find it.

So knowing when your target audiences are most likely to be viewing, and hence when best to send out messages or content such as social news submissions, Tweet, or Facebook updates, is important to ensure that your messages and content are actually going to be seen by the masses.

The question’s been asked time and time again regarding the best time to submit content to Digg or Reddit to ensure optimal exposure. While it was once speculated that submissions late at night (low-activity hours) had less competition with articles and therefore had a greater chance of being promoted to the front page overnight, it is now anyone’s guess whether that is true. It seems lately that the threshold of a front page promotion remains somewhat the same regardless of the time of day.

There are pros and cons of submitting content to social news sites during high-activity hours versus low-activity hours.

High-activity hour submissions: pros

• More votes
• More visitors
• More comments and engagement

High-activity hour submissions: cons

• Content gets filtered out of “new” or “upcoming” sections more quickly
• Visitor bounce rate may be higher due to content noise
• Engagement may be lower due to content noise

Low-activity hour submissions: pros

• Less noise
• More face-time on the “upcoming” or “new” sections.
• Easier front page promotion (speculative)

Low-activity hour submissions: cons

• Fewer visitors
• Fewer votes
• Greater foreign audience (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it depends on what the content is)
• Less comments and engagement

If you want to submit during high-activity hours then note that the majority of Digg users are in the U.S. and the best hours of exposure are under U.S. time. Most users tune in to social news sites during business hours which is usually 8:00 A.M to 5:00 P.M, and it’s good to go with the mean by using Central Standard Time (CST), submitting content around 7:00 P.M. – 8:00 P.M. so that it will be 6:00 A.M. – 7:00 A.M. in the west and 8:00 A.M. – 9:00 A.M. in the east. This way you will get the most exposure for your content.

When content is promoted to the front page in non-US business hours it is capturing a lot of viewers globally that are currently in high-activity hours themselves. While it is good to capture an international audience the content misses the highest amount of traffic it can potentially have.

Front page promotion timing

Submission exposure is only one half of the equation while front page exposure is the other half. Content may have a low-level of engagement overnight but if it is promoted to the front page overnight then the content is likely to be well-positioned during high-activity hours of the morning the next day. Conversely, this is when a lot of content is being promoted to the front page so the face-time on the front page is shortened by a high level of noise.

Content can be promoted to the front page at any time from approximately an hour after submission to 24 hours after submission. While the timing of the front page promotion is contingent upon the social news site’s algorithm and the qualitative voting data, the quantitative voting data can play a large role too.

For example, after a story is promoted to the front page on Digg it has a limited time to obtain a large amount of votes, to be one of the most Dugg stories, and make it to the “Top in All Topics” section on the right column. The “Top in All Topics” area allows the content to continue to get exposure for a longer period of time. If content front pages early after the submission then it must scramble to obtain enough Diggs to the most exposure before it becomes a victim of pagination. This is sometimes the downfall of breaking news stories that are promoted quickly and don’t get enough Diggs in time.

That said, sometimes it’s better to front page later in the day with a higher amount of votes to aim for the Top in All section. But if the content isn’t the best of the best, and doesn’t deserve to be there, it likely won’t. In that instance, you are luckier if your content is promoted to the front page in the A.M. hours.

While you have little control over your front page promotion timing you have full control over your submission timing. There are usually different scenarios for different types of content being submitted.

If you want to share a great piece of information or resource over Twitter or Facebook updates consider what time of day you submit it. Weigh out noise vs lower activity to make the best decision on when to shout your message.

As a resource, check out SocialBlade to see how users are behaving at Digg.com. You can view daily, weekly, and monthly trends and activity levels. This can be very helpful in deciding when to submit and promote content.