StumbleUpon Drives More Traffic than Facebook or Twitter – Plus INFOGRAPHIC

Any social media marketing strategy starts with having great unique content that is relevant for your target market and audience. That content could be humorous or educational.

It could be an entertaining video such as the YouTube videos for Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” or Blendtec’s “Will it Blend“.

It could be informative and educational content such as a blog article or a “how to” video that instructs visually.

Once you have created the content the next challenge and task is promoting and marketing to an online audience.

If you use the right social media marketing strategy and tactics your content and message will spread.

If you are lucky it could even go “viral”

Social Media’s Big Three

Social media marketing and sharing is dominated by the big three, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

There are other significant social media and networking platforms such as LinkedIn, Slideshare and Flickr that should also be considered to be in plans, depending on where your customers and prospects hang out.

Beyond these social networking sites there are a plethora of other sites that you can also use but who has the time to share on all of these?… ..no one!

So which other social media sites should you consider?

Social Media’s Poor Second Cousins

When I started my journey in social media there were other social networks that I did include in my social online sharing and they were Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon.

Along the way I forgot them and concentrated on Twitter and Facebook. There is nothing like a “shiny new toy” to get you distracted!

I recently stumbled across some data from Stat Counter – Global Stats that revealed that StumbleUpon drives more referral traffic than Facebook and Twitter!… In fact it drives more traffic than any other social media site.

StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to discover new content, and then have the option of voting and commenting on the selection.

The Statistics on StumbleUpon Worth Noting

StumbleUpon itself has just released a infographic that highlights some interesting facts and figures about its service that is worth keeping in mind

• Stumbleupon drives over 50 percent of social media traffic in the United States


• After 24 hours a popular shared link will typically get zero more “retweets” on Twitter, 5% more likes on Facebook but will get 83% more “stumbles”


• The half life of a link (the point in time when a link has garnered half of the engagement it will ever get) is 2.8 hours when shared on Twitter, 3.2 hours when shared on Facebook but a page shared on StumbleUpon has a half life of 400 hours.


• The average Stumble page view lasts 72 seconds which is 25 percent longer than the average web page view at 58 seconds

These numbers may change your thinking about StumbleUpon!

My Testing

In the last two days I have started sharing on StumbleUpon again and it has driven more referral traffic than Facebook but not Twitter. I will keep you posted as I experiment with the platform.

How have you found StumbleUpon? Has it been successful for you? I look forward to hearing your success stories!

6 Creative Ways to Make Content More Visual

We humans are visual creatures, and sometimes the best way for us to learn or understand a new concept is to actually see it. After all, that's why they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words," right?

So if humans love visuals, why not leverage that fact on your blog and in other content creation? Here are six great ways to make your inbound marketing content more visual.

6 Creative Ways to Improve Content With Visuals

1. Include High-Quality, Professional-Looking Photos and Images: Have you ever clicked through to a blog article that was all -- and only -- text? If the article didn't make you yawn during the first sentence, you probably didn't even make it to the first sentence. Blog posts, ebooks, and web pages that lack any sort of visual element are extremely uninviting to the eye. At the very least, include some kind of relevant and engaging photo or image on every page of content you create. In fact, research shows that images actually improve the performance of certain types of content in terms of engagement, such as on Facebook, emails, and even press releases. Please, just pick something that looks high quality and professional. It doesn't have to be an expensive stock photo. A Creative Commons image will usually do just fine.

2. Create Infographics: Consider including infographics as part of your content creation strategy. People love them, and it's not difficult to understand why. Infographics provide a ton of valuable information in an easy-to-digest and interesting format. Talk about value! Just be sure to choose a topic that your target audience would find valuable, and make sure it encompasses these ten traits like the following infographic from Tatango does.

3. Use Data/Content Visualization: Creating infographics is a lot of work. If you don't have enough data for a full-blown infographic, that doesn't mean you still can't present that information in a visual way. Simple data visualization, like the example below, can do wonders to improve a blog post or other piece of content.

The bonus? Your visualization doesn't even have to include data. Content visualization works, too! Here's a great example of what we mean. This visualization from Elliance doesn't highlight any data, but instead, it helps to visualize and explain a concept. Brilliant!

4. Produce Videos: Short videos can be a great visual way to support your content, and there are a number of situations that lend themselves to this type of visualization. Need to explain how to do something technical? Avoid a complicated text explanation, and instead consider creating a quick how-to video to describe it. Want to demonstrate how your product works? Make it more compelling with video! You can also use video in other unique ways, such as visualizing data in a more engaging way. Check out the example below from Erik Qualman for inspiration.

5. Use Eye-Catching Headers and Styles to Break Up and Call Out Text: Another very easy way to instantly improve the visual friendliness of your content is to simply break up and organize your text. You can do this by using headers to separate concepts or ideas, numbered lists or bullet points to make points easily scannable and digestible, and bolded text to call out and emphasize important information, such as statistics or major points (just as we've done in this very post!). Using these tactics will make your content instantly more attractive and inviting to your viewers.

6. Create Slideshows: Slideshows can be an effective way to present content and information. Quick tips, examples, and data can easily and effectively be formatted into a slide presentation to make the content much more engaging and sharable. Simply upload the presentation to a site like SlideShare and embed the content into a blog post. Consider the example below.

10 Things I Hate about Advertising

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

What other ways can you make your content more visually stimulating?

Photo Credit: Ahmed Sinan

4 Ways to Address Privacy Concerns in Your Marketing

Have you ever been at a social gathering, and you and one of your friends realized you'd been shopping at the mall/supermarket/pet store at the very same time earlier that day?

"No way! I was in there at 5! You went at 4:45?! We must have just missed each other!"

Say goodbye to those interactions! Thanks to Banjo, a social discovery service, a mobile application is now available that will alert you when a friend is nearby. Kind of sounds like a LoJack for your friends, right?

While this app is somewhere on the spectrum of awesome and creepy (we're leaning toward creepy), it brings up an important question to ponder: where do we draw the privacy line? The world of communication has morphed from being as private as possible into being as open as possible. In the midst of this are online interactions. And while inbound marketers are taught to be open and engaging on the internet, privacy is still a major issue, especially to your prospects and customers. To keep your marketing on the good side of the privacy line and to uphold your reputation as a credible business that respects people's privacy, here are four ways to address privacy concerns in your marketing.

1. In Social Media

There's an amalgam of privacy concerns users could run into or even violate when using a given social network. Usually, the social network has published a set of rules and regulations that clearly details what its privacy policy is, as well as a user's terms of service.

These privacy policies published by social networks should be a marketer's new best friend. Knowing and understanding what is or isn't allowed within every network will assist you in avoiding the various privacy infringing accusations that could be steered your way. For instance, Facebook has a strict set of guidelines regarding how contests and promotions must be (and not be) executed on its social network. If you're considering one of these types of campaigns on Facebook, you better know and adhere to Facebook's rules. Be cognizant of the specific rules that directly apply to your usage, and be ready to cite them when needed.

Start by becoming well-versed with LinkedIn's User Agreement, Facebook's Terms of Use, and Twitter's Terms of Service. You might even be surprised by what you learn—like how your privacy is very important to Facebook, or that you can't resell or rent access to LinkedIn to others. Make sure you're not violating any of these terms in your marketing efforts. The last thing you want to be known for is the company who violated users' privacy or broke Facebook's Terms of Use.

2. In Online Surveys

When asking prospects and customers to fill out surveys, we often request general background information to better understand and analyze the groups of people involved in the survey. Recently, I was asked to participate in a survey where it asked where I work and what city and town I am from. While this may seem like basic information, it is very specific. Coming from a small town, providing my town as well as the name of my company will narrow down exactly who I am (so much for "anonymous"). These types of very specific questions make survey respondents fear for their privacy and anonymity, and may even prevent them from completing your survey.

Only ask questions appropriate for the survey at hand. Are such sensitive, specific questions needed to obtain the information you're looking for? If you're asking for someone's specific company name, could you generate the information you're looking for by simply asking respondents to classify their company by industry and/or type instead? This is less intrusive and more appealing to a privacy-concerned survey respondent. Always use the kind of discretion you would want for yourself -- plus a tad more -- and you're probably in the safe spot.

Before every survey, ensure you and your team knows the plan of action when it comes to requesting and using certain personal information. Before survey respondents commit to taking your survey, be transparent about how their responses and information will be used. That way, if any privacy complaints arise in the future, you will have the comfort of knowing you were crystal clear in your procedure.

3. On Landing Pages

The same can be said about landing page forms. Landing pages with lead-capture forms are critical for inbound lead generation, but forms can be tricky, and they can cause major friction for getting prospects to convert into leads. In creating your form, ask for only the information you really need to contact and quality leads. Requests for more specific and unnecessary information will only raise privacy concerns among your landing page visitors and may even prevent them from completing your forms altogether, which will hurt lead generation. (Note: Depending on your lead generation goals, you may decide to add more or fewer form fields to generate a larger quantity of leads vs. fewer, higher quality leads.)

Always link to a clear and crisp privacy policy on every landing page form you create. Furthermore, oblige by that privacy policy! This is your online information-sharing bible. Explicitly state what your intentions are, and follow through. In addition, make this privacy policy be omnipresent in all your inbound marketing efforts. If someone raises a privacy concern, use your policy to address their concerns!

4. In Email Marketing

Unsolicited and un-customized email marketing is, in its own way, a privacy issue. Prospects and customers are not interested in receiving every single email your business sends. If they are receiving an email about one product one day, and then about another service the next (one they may have no interest in), you are giving them a reason to mark your message as spam. On the other hand, receiving one or two targeted emails a week or month that appeal to the recipient's interests and provide customized content will keep them engaged and wanting more.

This is where effective marketing automation comes in. Using information like landing page form responses as well as tracking the behavior of your prospects and customers (which blog topics are they reading about, which ebooks have they downloaded, which web pages did they visit?) will enable you to segment your email list based on their interests. This will help you to create customized email marketing messages that target specific recipients with relevant content.

Furthermore, always include a link to your privacy policy as well as an unsubscribe button at the bottom of your emails (it's required by CAN-SPAM legislation, so neglecting to do so will prime you not only for privacy complaints but may also result in legal ramifications).

What are some other ways you can address privacy concerns in your inbound marketing?

Image Credit: Satori.Image

Get Marketing Content On the Go: Listen to This Blog!

Always on the go but love you some inbound marketing tips and tricks? You're no longer limited to text. Now you can use the handy dandy Vocalyze widget in this blog's sidebar to listen to our latest blog posts, hands and eyes free! How's that for multimedia accessibility? (In fact, you can even listen to this very post!)

The new Vocalyze App allows you to listen to our blog content with automated text-to-speech streaming. (Note: The app is even available for free in HubSpot's App Markeplace for HubSpot customers to install on their own blogs.)

3 Ways to Listen to This Blog

1. Via the HubSpot Blog: Simply scroll down and click on the Vocalyze widget on the blog's sidebar just below our list of most popular posts. Then choose the article you'd like to listen to, and let your ears take it from there.

2. Via the Vocalyze Website: Visit www.vocalyze.com, and create an account. From there, you can add the HubSpot Blog to your own playlist (find it under Featured Blogs --> HubSpot Blog). Add other useful blogs to your playlist, too!

3. Via the Mobile App: To truly leverage the benefits of on-the-go HubSpot blog listening, download the Vocalyze mobile app, available for both iPhone and Android users. Then you can access your Vocalyze account and your playlists from anywhere!

So why on earth would you need to listen to our blog? Four awesome reasons, for starters ...

4 Great Reasons You'd Want to Listen to This Blog

1. Listen While You Commute: Got a long commute? HubSpot blog content strikes a healthy balance between the two extremes of listening to Lady Gaga on your way to work and listening to boring, nonfictional books on tape. A nice degree of intellectual stimulation, don't you agree?

2. Listen While You Clean: Cleaning your apartment/house/bathroom/car just got a whole lot more valuable. Now you can learn how to "Retweet the Right Way" while you dust!

3. Listen While You Exercise: What would pump you up during your exercise routine more than listening to a blog article about how to create awesome infographics?

4. Listen While You Bathe: Taking a bubble bath to relax after a long day's work? Light some candles, and fire up the audio version of "A Guide to Marketing Automation."

In all seriousness, there are a ton of great reasons why you'd want to listen to the HubSpot blog. Whether you're visually impaired, on the go, or constantly busy doing a million different things, the Vocalyze App enables you to stay on top of all the great inbound marketing blog content HubSpot has to offer.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your headphones and a dustpan and brush, and listen while you work!

What do you think of the new app?

Photo Credit: flattop341

Life-Size TRON Legacy Light Cycle

Imade Credit: Hammacher

Would you spend $55k on a real Light Cycle from TRON? Sitting here typing from my dual TRON keyboard, mouse, and gaming pad setup I can’t help but drool almost uncontrollably at the sight of this illuminated street legal motorcycle. Powered by a Suzuki 996cc, 4-stroke engine this six speed monster has a padded leather seat, hubless wheels, and chain-driven friction drum for acceleration and braking. Designed only for cruising or shows with a 3.5 gallon main fuel tank/1.25 gallon reserve tank and available now for users and programs from Hammacher.

Check Price

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Apple – Remembering Steve Jobs

Nokia promises tethering for Lumia 800, points finger of blame at FCC

Nokia's mission to reclaim smartphone competitiveness with its Windows Phone clan isn't over. We may have bemoaned the lack of data tethering in our Lumia 800 review, but it appears the Finnish phone titan has already announced that it will be coming to its Mango-flavored handsets. The apparent reason behind the inability of its flagship Windows Phone to share its data connectivity at launch was due to the FCC's stringent requirements. A Nokia spokesperson explained to WinRumors that Microsoft felt it was important to address "concerns raised by recent FCC regulations" before the feature was enabled, but that they're "optimistic" the convenient data-sharing function will arrive on Nokia's new smartphone through a software update. Dates, timelines and logistics (OTA? Link to Zune?) remain a mystery, but it would certainly make a merry present for anyone not dreaming of a white Christmas.

Nokia promises tethering for Lumia 800, points finger of blame at FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.