Stumbing Through the Great Big Web

                                         

StumbleUpon was a site that I was not familiar with prior to the social media class I took. I honestly had never heard of the website until I realized I had to create an account. Apparently StumbleUpon is much larger and popular than I ever knew of. The social networking platform has over 25 million registered users of the site and also has over 25 billion stumbles or posts/findings.

Four graduate students named Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd founded StumbleUpon in 2002 while in graduate school at the University of Calgary. The basis of StumbleUpon’s platform is to create a place for users to have a discovery engine where you can find and be recommended web content to users. On the social media site, people can “like” your websites and add them to their profile, which is then shared with their friends and using the “stumble” button placed on a user’s profile once they are registered.

When I became a member, I was surprised at how easy the site was to maneuver around. Being a major privacy bug, that was a major concern for me, and was satisfied with the security measures within the social media site. I did notice in order to get the most out of your StumbleUpon experience, you need to be an active user. This is true for businesses as well. After researching some, I learned that in order to make sure sites are credible, StumbleUpn will label a business “spam” and kick off if the business is using StumbleUpon to ONLY market your company’s website, then they will kick you off quickly.

StumbleUpon also has a program for businesses that solely wish to use the site purely for promotional purposes to appeal to those companies who wish to be a part of the site but rather not be actively participating. A business can be a part of the Paid Discovery Program, which is where StumbleUpon will place the company website in front of registered users and whenever a user clicks on the site, the company has to pay a flat fee of $.10 per click. If your site gets clicked several hundred times or even thousands of times, the bill will rack up pretty quick through this program.

Overall, it seems as though to effectively use StumbleUpon as a user and a business, being actively involved in the site seems to be a requirement. If a business can dedicate either the time or the money to be in the Paid Discovery Program, then StumbleUpon is definitely a great marketing tool to use.