The Blog For Entrepreneurs

“Digg is great but is dominated by the big players and Internet gurus who know how to ‘work the system’ whereas Twitter is more democratic and gives bloggers a better chance of getting a loyal following”

Unlike the 70′s when deciding to be a ‘Mod’ or a ‘Rocker’ was the in thing, you don’t have to decide to be a Twitterer(!) or a Digger. If you have a WordPress blog, like this one, you have a plethora of plugins to choose from for you and your readers to syndicate your content at a click of a mouse. I use the ‘Tweet This‘ plugin which, despite its name, has all of the social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Plurk etc as an option as well as Twitter.

The argument about Digg being controlled by those who know how to ‘work the system’ is given some credence by the fact that 56% of the home page content is controlled by the top 100 users, but it is also a fact that these users need to get more Diggs to reach the home page.

On Twitter, you are guaranteed a certain amount of clicks from your users for each tweet you make (Twitter runs at about 5% of followers for us as an instant click), if you have used your ReTweet options correctly you can get an article, that would get nothing on Digg, to be seen by a lot of people. I use ‘TweetMeme‘ and their ReTweet button to allow users to Retweet articles they like (hint, hint top right hand corner…lol…;). Funnily enough Tweememe is, essentially, the Digg for Twitter.

In this respect Twitter is more instantaneous than Digg, however, if you have a great article and you are looking for a big bang, then Digg is hard to beat (unless you have zillions of followers on Twitter).

The Digg Bang

Reaching the front page of Digg, known as the ‘Digg Effect’ can yield huge rewards as far as viewership and linking is concerned. John Chow discusses his article ‘The Internets Biggest Google Whores’ and how it yielded massive views when it hit the front page of Digg. It is hard to conceive of an article doing something similar on Twitter withiut the use of Tweetmeme or similar ‘Digg type’ services.

Twitters Buy – Diggers Don’t

At the risk of mentioning John Chow too much, he does go on to reveal some interesting facts in that particular article. His ‘Google Whores’ article yielded 112,000 Google ads served and made $95.19. Compare this to a recent review I did on Be-A-Magpie which, so far, has gotten about 110 clicks from Twitter (as of writing) and has made $9.00. I know its apples and oranges but 112,000 views would have earned my site $9163.63 on that basis.

I think it maybe the more personal aspect to Twitter that makes it a more productive marketplace for sales. Some would say this naivety will soon wear off as the platform becomes controlled by its main users or as Digg appears to be or worse, spammers, but we shall see.

Being a Top User Vs Being a Power Twitterer

Becoming a top user on Digg takes a lot of time and effort. In his excellent article ‘Secrets to Success on Digg‘, Eric Enge says:

“Becoming a top user will be a serious investment. It is not easy. First and foremost, forget about submitting any of your own content. You’ll need to spend lots of time commenting on other people’s submissions (preferable on the submissions of top users, and if you can, be one of the first comments as this will be more likely to get you noticed).”

Amusingly, he also posts what Diggers love and hate:

Things That Digg Users Love:

1. Apple
2. The Office
3. Ron Paul
4. Battlestar Galactica
5. Apple
6. Google
7. Chuck Norris
8. The environment
9. Open Source

Things That Digg Users Hate:

1. Microsoft
2. George W. Bush
3. RIAA
4. Fox News
5. Press releases
6. SEOs

Nice…

Becoming a Twitter ‘Power’ user is also a lot of hard work, however, there are now so many Twitter apps that can be used to automate the process, you can get traffic by doing virtually nothing. For example, try this:

-Sign Up for a Twitter Account
-Visit Tweetlater and set your account up to ‘auto follow’ and ‘auto unfollow’ and input a standard follow message.
-Join IfollowBack.com
-Join TwitterFollwer.com
-Follow a couple of hundred people on each service.
-Join Twitterfeed.com and input a feed on the subject you want to cover (e.g. BBC sport RSS etc) there is also a box to input a shortened URL which should link to your site. (If you want to make some money, shorten it with Tweetbucks)

You can now sit back and watch your list of followers grow and the traffic from that dribble in. This is a way to get started on Twitter, not necessarily a way to run your twitter account. In this respect, however, it is easier, over a period of time to build a potential audience than it is on Digg.

As an example, if you ran the above on auto pilot for six months you could expect to get 500 to 2000 followers. You could then take that account and switch of the automated stuff and start to run your blog through it properly.

I will tell you something, however, the quality of followers won’t be great (you will have a lot of spammers) but with careful pruning you will have some traffic and potential buyers.

Conclusion

The debate will obviously rage on, let’s face it my older brother and sister still argue whether ‘Slade’ were better than ‘Wings’ (anybody under 40 should probably Google them), so we will hear the arguments from all sides of the office for many a day to come.

Personally, for me Twitter is an interesting beast. It has the potential to give bloggers a mathematical way of seeing their traffic come in. What I mean is that I know at least 5% of my followers will click a link instantly, for the moment that is about 100 visitors that will visit my site each day with three Tweets. That is something I can rely on and something I can build slaes on.

Digg is the network where a front page article is very much like this video: If you paddle hard enough to get on the big Digg wave the links and kudos you get will let you ride it for a long time: