What are social news sites by ericwelke

Articles from EricWelke.com What are Social News Sites? by Eric Welke

Social news sites are a type of social media that crowd-source some of the functions of an editor and curator. These sites let users decide which story is worthy or unworthy of being featured on the front page. The decision is usually influenced by the memberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal tastes, background and the freshness of the story. Each user typically has the privilege to vote on a submission. The most popular stories are then featured on the front page of the site or it becomes the top story for a particular category. The most popular social new sites like Reddit often cover a wide variety of topics. Others tend to specialize on a particular niche like DesignBump whose members are mostly designers. Social bookmarking started initially as a way for users to â&#x20AC;&#x153;bookmarkâ&#x20AC;? a link for reference or future reading. Once these sites started to rank the popularity of the links being bookmarked they became similar in scope and function to social news sites. For simplicity both have been lumped into one category. Communities have grown up around these sites. Lively discussions and debates about popular issues, and their innate social nature have made them very popular with a significant amount of users. Benefits for your Business Unlike social networks, gaining a good reputation on social new sites depends a lot on the usefulness of the information you post. Ideally you should be posting informative articles that would provide benefit to its readers; however this mostly works only on niche sites. Sites that handle a wider choice of topics usually up-vote

for the most interesting reads. Social news sites are a great way to get targeted traffic to your website, but you will need to build up a good reputation first. Although there are some tactics that could get you a lot of traffic initially, these aren’t usually beneficial in the long run. It’s much better to have solid reputation as a valuable contributor to the site rather than someone who resorts to spammy tactics. Aside from traffic, social news sites can be a good source of leads. Try to participate in discussions where you can contribute your expertise. Niche sites might seem to be a good place to start, but remember they tend to attract other experts too. Send messages to people who look like they may need your services but refrain from doing this indiscriminately as there are usually penalties for unwanted solicitation. You might try asking them to send you a private message instead if they are interested.

Contribution and Reputation The typical reason for joining news sites is of course to get relevant news from trusted sources. There’s also the benefit of joining a community of like-minded people. If you’re a typical user then you won’t really need to build your reputation on the site. However, if you’re aiming to do some promotions or marketing then you will have to invest time and share your knowledge to build credibility. Once you have gained the respect of the community then you can try and do some marketing and prospecting. Of course, again we shouldn’t be too blatant about it or we risk undermining our reputation.