Outstanding Plugin: Social Media for Firefox

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It’s no secret that the best way to improve your changes of being Stumbled, Digg’d, and whatever they call it at Reddit or Del.icio.us, is to have lots of friends who will boost your submissions.  Not so well known, however, is that the second best way is to submit the web sites that are already gaining popularity on the other bookmarking services.  I learned about this back in the Web 1.0 days of Fark and Slashdot.  It’s even more true today, where users are allowed to pick the topics that make it to the front page rather than a potentially biased moderator.

97th Floor has released a Firefox plugin that makes it even easier to see which sites are popular on one bookmarking service, but not another.  If you happen across a news story or blog post that has forty stumbles but has not yet been submitted to Digg, you have a pretty reasonable chance of hitting the Digg front page if you submit it.  You get a few submissions to the front page of Digg and people will see that you are someone who is likely to submit quality material.  They’ll add you to their friends list where, hopefully, they basically auto-Digg your content from now on.

This is a screen shot of the tool, as I am looking at the download page. You’ll see that no one has submitted this page to Del.icio.us yet.  So I clicked the icon and submitted it.  Easiest social bookmarking tool I’ve use yet.  I’m not sure how quickly it updates (And, not being a regular user of Del.icio.us, I’m not sure how quickly their site updates), but if you click the MANUAL button you should see the numbers of the website you’re looking at.  The Del.icio.us counter didn’t update immediately, but I know that I added it, so I have to assume this number will increase sometime later in the morning.

This is a good-looking tool.  I appreciate that it uses the status bar rather than creating yet another toolbar at the top of my screen.  While it filled the last piece of available real estate in my status bar, I’d prefer to remove stuff like the Alexa rankings and Fasterfox timer than have another half-empty toolbar shrinking my screen space.

The other GREAT benefit is that it will automatically display the counters when you visit one of the social bookmarking sites.  This is a screenshot from StumbleUpon’s Recently Popular Websites right now:

To an Internet marketer, the ability to drive traffic using social bookmarking is invaluable.  Using this tool can really help improve your profile.  It’s easy to see that a page which is popular on one site will be popular on others.  You don’t have to throw something out there and hope it sticks.  Submitting great content that has nothing to do with your business, however, is the best way to make sure that your business is seen you do submit your own content.  Social bookmarkers will hate you if you submit one site a day, and it happens to be your own.  But if you submit twenty sites a day, most of which are popular, no one will think twice about when you submit your own.  Gain enough popularity and they’ll submit it for you.

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