Noted :: Have You Stumbled Upon StumbleUpon?

While StumbleUpon is not new site, it’s a social media platform that’s been growing exponentially over the last few years – reaching over 25 million registered users earlier this year. Stumbleupon is ‘discovery engine’ – which is a form of a web search engine – that enables its users to peruse unique web content that is specified to their interests. Once you signup for StumbleUpon, it will ask you what type of content you are interesting in – photography, philosophy, design, exotic pets? StumbleUpon has it all.

I would describe StumbleUpon as a hybrid of websites like Pinterest and Pandora. It takes all your interests and breaks them down into categories (Pinterest), allows you to skip through and “like” what enjoy and dislike what you don’t. Then, based off your likes and dislikes, it will give you recommended photographs, webpages or videos that are specified to your taste (Pandora). StumbleUpon is also similar to other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, because it allows you to create your own user profile, follow other users and share content. Other features of the site include a “StumbleBar” which you can download to bookmark, like, dislike, and share content to other social media sites. Of course, there’s an app too.

So, why is StumbleUpon an important platform for your business? Well, according to research, StumbleUpon drives more traffic referrals than any other social media site. Users can look, and like, hundreds of websites within a short period of time. By having even one person “like” your business website, image or video, you can be assured that someone else will “stumble upon” your content as well. With social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can create content and measure it through “likes” and url trackers like bitly – but you can’t grow your potential audience quite like StumbleUpon. With each “like” your content will be passed along to another potential StumbleUpon user, and so on an so forth. Social media sites also help with SEO, especially a site such as StumbleUpon which drives a lot of links to your content or website quickly. Businesses are also starting to add a “StumbleUpon” badge to their content to help increase the popularity of their content / posts. I recently was looking at AdAge’s Power 150 Marketing Blogs, which uses StumbleUpon, as well as other methods, to measure who is highest in the rankings for influential marketing blogs.

Have you explored StumbleUpon? Do you use it or factor it into your social media and marketing plan? If you like this post, be sure to submit it to StumbleUpon using the badge below!

~Allyson