Love it or hate it, digg is one of the big hitters in social media. For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume that your intent is to make the digg front page.
To preface: I understand that you may hate the fact that you need digg friends to get your story to the front page. Before I became active on digg, it infuriated me that what I considered to be good content would go by completely unnoticed. Still, I came to terms with the fact that with so many digg users submitting content, it would require something more on my part to do anything with my stories. Whether you love or hate the way the system works, I’m simply telling you how it works.
There’s no real secret to digg. Generally speaking, if you get over 100 diggs within 24 hours, you’re in good shape to have your submission hit the front page. If your story hasn’t gone popular within 24 hours, 99% of the time it won’t. However, this varies a lot by user history (it’ll usually take more if you’ve never had a front page) and by website (some websites are white listed, and therefore a better idea for users looking to get their first fp — see Flickr, YouTube, etc.). While this may seem like an invitation to spammers, I believe that the algorithm does its best to figure out whether random users are interested in your story. Generally speaking, my articles that hit the fp the fastest have diggs from friends and non-friends. Still, getting a boost from your friends early on will help other users find your articles. If Joe Digg is looking at new articles in Apple, he’s probably going to be drawn to the one with 20 diggs already rather than the ones with 1 or 2 diggs.
The real trick, then, is making friends with very active diggers. Many wannabe power diggers throw a profile together and start adding everyone they can find. This is a terrible technique for many reasons which will be explained within this article.
Who Should I Add?
Power diggers are power diggers for a reason: they spend a significant portion of their day finding stories and, more importantly, digging their friends’ stories. I’d recommend that you take a look at this page and start looking at the top user’s friends. I’m a huge fan of adding friends through the View All Friends list because you can quickly see how many submissions they’ve dugg within the past 24 hours. I generally start looking at the profiles of people who have dugg 200+ articles in the past 24 hours.
Profile Puffing
So now you’ve found people to add, but will they add your back? Amazingly, 20-40 people per day add me as a friend, and 0-1 of them are even worth considering making a mutual friend. I’ll show you the warning signs of a bad digger that I always look for.
1. Stupid Names
Okay, well, not so much stupid names as much as names that flag me that the user is going to spam me. For extra points, pick a name that tells me something about yourself.
Note: don’t make a name like BigBoobCaliGirl unless you’re actually a girl with big boobs from Cali. It’s not going to make me add you as a friend. Diggers are catching onto these stupid spammers pretending to be hot females.
2. Picture No-No’s
Please, for the love of god, stop with the pictures of hot girls. It’s not going to make me want to add you to my friend list. It’s going to make me think you’re a spammer.
More importantly, try to have some picture to show me that you care enough about your account to spent 20 seconds uploading a photo. I keep track of how many articles each friend submits generally by memorizing their profile pictures. I don’t like to have too many photoless friends for that reason.
Also, tell me something about yourself in your bio space. Just not that you’re an SEO or a marketer. Hopefully those terms don’t define you, and even if it’s true, there must be something interesting for you to say.
3. No Mutual Friends
I’ll usually glance at your friends list to see if you have any mutual friends. I’m not so much looking to see whether you’re mutual friends with power diggers so much as whether anyone thinks you’re useful enough to have as a friend. If I see a whole bunch of non-mutuals when I load your profile, my spidey sense tingles.
This is by no means a deal-breaker. I think that most good diggers realize that everyone starts somewhere. Still, consider removing non-mutual friends after a few days so as not to muck up your otherwise decent profile.
I should also mention that you could have every power digger as a mutual friend, and if your stats didn’t back it up, I wouldn’t even think about adding you.
4. Bad Statistics
These are arguably the most important factor for those of you looking to add friends. To the right, you’ll see what I consider bad statistics. I’m generally looking for someone with at least 1000 diggs. I’ll also perform a mental calculation dividing total diggs by submissions which I’ll call the digg ratio. The result is a value indicating how many diggs the user gives per each submission.
With the user illustrated, he gives about 1.5 diggs per submission, which is ridiculous. Think about it this way: you should be supporting your mutual friends, who probably submit at least an article a day. For this reason, you want to look for users with digg ratios over 100, and probably closer to 200. These will be the users who will support your submissions.
I also look at the popular ratio. If I see that a user has submitted 100 articles but none have gone popular, I’m going to be a suspicious. If the other stats are good, I may take the time to review the submissions to see if they’re spam. If I’m low on time though, I might just decide not to add them.
Lastly, comments are another thing that I look at if I’m “on the fence.” I like to see that my friends are intelligent enough to formulate a complete thought (extra points for a complete sentence). If it’s clear from their comments that they’re a spammer or just plain stupid, I assume that they won’t be a good mutual friend.
Don’t think that having 0 comments is a good way around this rule, either. If you have 0 comments, I’ll assume that you’re not willing to participate in the digg community, which is another point against you.
5. Too Many Submissions
Ever since digg’s recent algorithm change, I’ve had to be a lot more concerned with how many articles my friends are submitting. I try to only digg 1 in 3 of my friends’ submissions, but the more submissions each friend makes, the more difficult it is for me to comb through my friend submissions and digg everyone fairly. Ideally I look for friends who submit 0-3 articles per day.
You may want to be a bit more lenient with top diggers for a while until you’ve established yourself. If you can get top diggers to make you a mutual, other diggers will find you via their profile. This is really a judgment call.
6. Too Many Friends
This one should be a no-brainer. Too many friends and they’re not going to have time / diggs to watch every submission. I try to keep my friend count under 200, but I’ll consider adding people with up to 300 (or slightly more) friends.
Other Advice
The last bit of advice that I can give you is to take the time to digg the last 5 submissions of the users who you really want to friend you. The reason is that most serious diggers use API programs that will list off non-mutual friends who have dugg 5 of their submissions. While this probably won’t automatically get you added as a mutual, they will probably give a serious look at your profile. And since you’ve read this article and followed my tips, your profile is great and they’re going to add you — right?
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
This is all very good advice, which can be boiled down to four basic principles:
1. To get your story to front page, you need superb content
2. To get people to see your superb content, you need friends to give it the initial boost.
3. To get friends, you really need to be a real participant in the Digg community, giving before taking and interested in other people’s good content.
On an interesting note, if somebody takes the time to digg most of my stuff (like 9 out of the past 10), I do try not to miss anything they submit. But you are right; that gets tough when somebody submits 20 items per day.
That more or less mirrors how I choose to befriend on digg. I’d also add that I usually only add people if their submissions are interesting as that is kinda the most important thing for me.
@David Leonhardt: Agree, especially with respect to participating in the Digg community.
@Touchingwood: Right, I definitely should have mentioned that. I usually look at past submissions to see if they’re interesting and/or spammy. I’ll also remove friends if they become too spammy or lame.
Can i take a one small photo from your blog?
AnnaHopn
@AnnaHopn, Yes?