Forget ABCs – The Social Media Alphabet Is DNRS

Many
search marketers know their search engine alphabet, A for Ask.com; G
for Google; M for Microsoft Live.com and Y for Yahoo. But how many
know the important letters of the social media alphabet, D for Digg; N
for Netscape; R for Reddit and S for StumbleUpon? Comfortable with
AGMY but DNRS seems like another language? Relax. Here are the ABCs of DNRS:

Digg

Digg is a social news site that covers all
topics but is mainly populated with tech, world and business stories. Digg is a
community based website where users submit stories, “digg” or vote for the
stories they like and share their thoughts through comments.

The overall purpose of Digg is to get stories promoted to the homepage
through voting which is predominately controlled by the top users because of the
stories they choose to submit and the number of digg friends they have.

The New Digg Features
Plus, A Submitter’s Perspective is a recent story I wrote for Search Engine
Land that covers Digg in more depth.

Netscape

Netscape is similar to Digg, but it is
mainly populated with political stories. Like Digg, the community decides which
stories are promoted to the homepage. The difference is that the stories have to
work their way up to the top of the homepage and only have a lifespan of 24
hours. After 24 hours a story is removed from the queue and the homepage.

Although Netscape is similar to Digg, there are differences that affect the
promotion of a story. The first is that on Netscape, stories are not mainly
controlled by friends. The second is that Netscape Anchors (employees of
Netscape) can pin stories at the top of the homepage to give them prime
visibility.

Reddit

Reddit is also another social news site like
Digg and Netscape. Like Netscape, you have to work your way up to the top of the
homepage, which can make it difficult to get a story good visibility. Reddit also
makes it harder by allowing people to give stories a “down vote.” All the other
sites in the social media alphabet also allow users to vote down a story, but on
Reddit, the down vote option is more prominent and thus more widely used by
users. So if users like a story, they give it an up vote. If they hate a story,
they give it a down vote.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a community driven
website that revolves around a toolbar.

Users surf the web as they normally would and when they find a site they like,
they give it a thumbs up. If they find a site they dislike, they give it a
thumbs down. If users want to view something cool or random, they hit the Stumble
button on their toolbar. That takes them to pages that other users with similar
interests have liked. You can also visit StumbleUpon’s buzz page (shown
in the large screenshot above)
to see what’s popular right now.

The overall goal of StumbleUpon is to drive traffic to a site by getting more
users to give your stories a “thumbs up,” which can be accomplished by building
a high audience rating and by making friends with other users. But unlike the
other social sites, StumbleUpon only allows you to add up to 200 friends.

Try Out Your New Alphabet

The next time you have a few spare moments, check out this
social media alphabet soup of sites and get to know them. They have been growing
at a rapid pace over the past year. More and more marketers are trying to get
familiar with them because they can drive thousands of visitors to a website
within minutes and potentially create thousands of natural links to it, which
can help improve a site’s search engine rankings.

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.