I’ve noticed what I think is a trend in the ways people engage with me on this site:
- If I write a short, focused post, or one with a clear call to action, it gets comments.
- If I write a controversial post, it gets trackbacks.
- If I write a long list or thorough analysis piece, it gets bookmarked or stumbled.
- Very few of my posts get dugg.
My guess:
- Short posts are easy to get through in a minute or two, so commenting is relatively low-effort. Posts with a call to action, well, call you to action. Same result.
- Controversial posts provoke thought, after which people write their own posts.
- Long lists and analyses aren’t as easy to digest, so people save them and return to them later.
The question is, what makes a post digg-able?
Thoughts?
6 Comments
Could it be the majority of your audience is not the “digging” kind Dave? There are a lot of active blog readers, stumblers, commenters out there who have never used Dig before.
Interesting to think about… I wonder what the answer is.
Yeah, I’ll have to side with Ben. I actively participate in the space and don’t use Dig at all. I actually find the opposite with short versus long posts on my blog, though my long posts are often controversial AND have a call to action.
I’ll have to echo everybody else-I usually use Del.ici.ous rather than Digg. Maybe we’re just not a Digg-ing bunch?…
Perhaps the better question, Dave, is why you want your posts to be dugg.
My experience is that the Digg community skews largely on matters of technology. Perhaps a variant of Digg would be beneficial for Marketing and PR. But, back to Ari’s question, why would you want your posts to be dugg?
Hey Mark, Ari…
I don’t particularly ‘care’ if my posts get dugg. I’m flattered if anyone sees fit to save/vote for them on any service, but I have no particular craving for it. Subscriber trends are a better indicator for me of whether my posts are resonating over time.
However, I am curious as to why some posts (not on this site, clearly) get dugg while others get stumbled/saved on Delicious/spunn etc. It’s a curiosity thing.
One Trackback
[...] In a blog entry published on September 25, Dave Fleet offered a great summary of his experience with different types of audience engagement based on how he shares his ideas (see Different Types of Engagement). [...]