StumbleUpon Campaigns - Why Good Feedback is Important.
When running a Stumble Upon advertising campaign, good feedback is a very important factor to consider. This is important for a number of reason. The first is the obvious reason that you should want your message to be as well received as possible. If someone likes your message they will more likely take the action you want them to take. This, however, is not the only reason that seeking feedback is important.
The way stumble upon works is that feedback ratings are taking from users, mixed with the number of new posts that user submits, and that user gets a ranking. The ranking of a user determines the weight of their thumb. A new user with a low ranking may thumbs up a post with little effect or possibility of someone new seeing it. A top stumbler can thumbs up a post which will be guaranteed to be seen by 100+ people because of their weight. If more people like your post, the more chances you have to land a top stumbler who will hopefully add a thumbs up and carry the piece even further increasing the viral effect of StumbleUpon. As a side note, it is very important to keep up with a good stumble upon account and use it regularly to increase the weigh of your own thumbs up. That is a very simple way to push the content of a campaign a little bit further. Which, as with good feedback from other users, gives you more bang for your marketing dollar. It is possible, if not common, to see StumbleUpon yield 7-8 times the visitors than were expect.
How can you get good feedback on an article? The first and obvious way is to make the content as good as possible, make it shine. Since a relatively few number of people will actually give a thumbs up, every thumbs up counts. The other major way to get good feedback is to target the right category, and do some testing between categories. If you have a funny picture, it might be tempting to categorize that picture in “Photography”. Big mistake. The photography category is one of the hardest categories to get good feedback from. This category contains some very amazing work, and is very difficult to get good feedback even for professional photographers. Often times, good but not great works will get a thumbs down since the bar for quality is set extremely high. However, the “Humor” category is probably one of the easiest. If it is mildly funny, someone might give it a thumbs up, but they are less likely to give it a thumbs down, which can limit the number of people who see the content. The best bet is to try a little bit of traffic in a couple of different categories, then pick the one that has the most positive ratings and stick with that.
Mike Palmer
Analyst
