Why i Like StumbleUpon

I started using social media when i joined twitter. Twitter turned out to be a great medium for meeting new people and marketing my blog. After some time, when i attained a decent reputation on twitter, I decided to increase my online presence by joining other major social media websites. The one that stood out among them was StumbleUpon. The meaning of Stumbleupon is to stumble on something i.e. to come across something useful. That is what you have to do. Just stumble across a useful post or article and thumb it up. You can also review it and post your comments.

From this description, it may seem that StumbleUpon is just like any other social bookmarking website, where you can vote and share. But there are a lot of things that make StumbleUpon different from other social bookmarking websites.  In StumbleUpon you can easily find users from similar niche or topic.  You can easily interact and befriend people using the message inbox provided to you. But there is also a flip side to it, that this messaging service can attract a lot of spammers.

Welcomes New Users

The best part of being at Stumbleupon is that you don’t need to be a very active user to be popular. You just need to be regular and make friends with other stumbleupon users. Unlike social media websites like Digg, users on StumbleUpon are very friendly and will add you, if you provide good content and if you are not a spammer. But yes you have to keep in mind that you need to thumb up useful posts and maintain the quality of the content that you are stumbling. As you’re favorites will increase, so will your reputation and friends.

Feature Rich Toolbar

StumbleUpon Toolbar Features

Stumbleupon has a really useful toolbar which comes as a firefox addon. It comes loaded with a lot of features, making stumbling a one minute task by just having to “Thumb up” or “Thumb Down”. Through this toolbar you can stumble upon articles according to different categories and also check out random pages using the “Stumble” Button. Besides this, you can view all the shares sent by friends and also share articles via this toolbar.

Easy Sharing

Sharing articles among friends is really easy. You can share using the Stumbleupon toolbar or from the Stumbleupon website. If you want to share it to all your friends at the same instant, you can do that using the su.pr website.

It’s Not Very Time Consuming

In StumbleUpon you don’t need to visit the StumbleUpon website everytime to see the shares, you can do that using the toolbar. Unlike Digg, where you have to first visit their website and then click again to view the original article. And along with that you don’t need to stumble 1000 websites wach day. In fact, it is better that you stumble only 100 pages which are good and are worth sharing.

Good Source of Traffic

Because of StumbleUpon’s random stumbling feature, you constantly receive traffic on your stumbled posts. StumbleUpon has been a very good traffic source for my blog, ranking just after twitter.

Spam Free

StumbleUpon is comparatively less prone to spam than twitter and facebook.  StumbeUpon moderates user activities. If a user is excessively spamming, he/she can get banned. Also, If a person is using multiple accounts to promote a website, the website too can be banned from StumbleUpon.

Visitor Tracking

This is a very small feature in StumbleUpon website, but i like it because you get noticed easily when you are viewing other user’s StumbleUpon pages. And it also increases the chances of getting new friends to your network.

You can add me on Stumbleupon

That’s just my view, what do you think of StumbleUpon? What is your story?