Initially, I just wanted to report about some experience on Crowd news platform - DIGG, but then i noticed that I try to cover at least two different topics in one post, so I decided to split. In that article, I will cover key factors of success on news-driven social communities like well-known DIGG and will cover my first serious steps with DIGG in the next article.
Currently, I’m the number 49 of top users of the Russian DIGG sister RDS1, therefore I think to have some experience and some kind of instinctive feeling for mechanisms in such communities. RDS is a typical example of a social news-driven page and is quite similar to DIGG. Therefore my experience can be useful also for DIGG users and other similar Web2.0 (social media) sites.
Success factors of digging
As I think there a only two main factors your success (success of your submissions) depends on. That are the quality of your stories and trust.
High quality stories
High quality stories are known as:
- unique
- unusual
- very actual
- interesting for everybody (The broadest audience)
Those are primary properties a successful story. Now you may think that the appreciation of these attributes is highly subjective, which is maybe true. However everyone can achieve good objectivity by analyzing the actuality of post. E.g. U.S. President elections are quite actual at the moment and Cold War maybe not2. However with some experience, the appraisal of these properties will get better and better. I can say I began to feel what kind of stories can reach the TOP.
To be actual and have many stories to choose, it is recommended to subscribe to RSS feeds of news portal of your wish or several of them. If your social community portal presents websites statistic , you are well-advised to study it and chose some with the best success rate.
So what to do? How to begin? The answer is clear too, you just have to star and play a bit around. If you are non completely new in the field of social news community, then you just can’t leave this step out. However as already mentioned the success factor of your news will grow with experience.
It is difficult to provide some examples of good or bad news because it highly depends on the time context and also other things like presentation! Presentation is one of the sub-factors I wanna say some words about:
- Always use pictures! Choose them with care.
- Use headlines that magnify attention (Compare: “Microsoft considers to by some Yahoo shares” vs. “Microsoft takes over Yahoo!”)
- But use headlines that are precisely express what is in the content behind them. Otherwise, your messages can be considered as spam or inaccurate.
- Be aware of duplicates
- The content itself should be well presented and layout carefully. Don’t write too much, but try to make your link sexy. Don’t lie.
- Use the right category!
By doing so you will create solid and high potential submissions, and you have learned this, the second factor comes to a play which helps enormously to use the potential of your submissions.
Trust
If at the beginning of your “journey” maybe non of your messages will reach the top. Even at a master level, the rate of your positive submissions can rise up to 50-99 percent (depending on social service and other factors). But this success is only possible with an active circle of friends!
How to get friends in social communities? You should be able to answer this question to yourself, because its not much different as in the real life. Friendship grounds on mutuality, reliability, trust and need significant time-invest.