Do Digg & Del.icio.us Buttons Work?
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 3rd, 2007 12:17 amTodd Zeigler over at Bivings has a post up on the media’s adoption of social bookmarking tools. It seems like more and more media sites are adopting buttons to Digg, del.icio.us, and Facebook it, not to mention every blogger looking to bling out their sites in 16×16 goodness.
Still, I wondered just how effective the Digg and del.icio.us buttons are. So I looked it up. Since launching this site about a month ago, I’ve gotten about 21 referrals from del.icio.us and 3 referrals from Digg. (Yeah… not exactly Earth-shattering.) Only one article has been Dugg, with 10 total Diggs. By contrast, a smallish but still greater number of pages have been del.icio.us’d, from a combined 24 bookmarks on the 2008 Wire main page to 12 to my homepage to 4 posts from the new version of the site.
I think this speaks to the effectiveness of these tools. Frankly, I’m not sure a tool like Digg can work as a major political portal — the quickest way to rise in the politics section is to say “IHateBushitler” because in the political world (unlike technology), there isn’t really an objective measure of quality or coolness, just partisanship. Digg is also a crapshoot; maybe one post in 1,000 has a chance of making it to the main page. And if it’s that good, I suspect people will find a way of Digging it without the embedded button on your site.
Meanwhile, a tool like like del.icio.us which isn’t intended to drive oodles of traffic, gets more traction and probably generates more quality hits than a social news site like Digg. That’s because it’s a very useful tool no matter what field you’re in. While Digg is plagued by a low signal-to-noise ratio (even on the home page), you know that if someone has del.icio.us’d your content, it’s important to them and they will refer to it and keep coming back to it.
Bottom line: Because of this fact, I’ll probably keep the del.icio.us icon, but will look to junk the Digg icon at the first opportunity.
With all sorts of widgets and badges popping up all over the place, some more useful than others, it’s important to have metrics that tell us which of them (if any) actually work. What I don’t understand is bloggers who do this:
Wired News has dubbed this phenomenon “Iconistan” and for good reason. Not only have you thoroughly confused your readers, but you’ve spread whatever meager traffic these social bookmarking sites would generate over 10 sites instead of two. Thanks, but I’ll stick with the frontrunner, del.icio.us, if only to make all the icons go away!
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