Here is the math behind the major social networks, the formulas worked down from analyzing their inner mechanisms and just exactly how a submission gets a “popular” status. Hopefully, these social networking statistics will provide some insight into how they work, and which ones might be easier to manipulate for your particular niche.

Social Network: Digg
Digg takes, on average, 60 – 300 “Diggs” to become popular, and you can expect to receive around 10,000 to 100,000 unique visitors if your story makes the Digg homepage.

Social Network: StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon submissions take about 30 – 50 “Thumbs Ups” and/or reviews to become popular, and you can expect to receive anywhere from 2,000 – 50,000 unique visitors in the first round, and you will probably receive more traffic over time, in residual waves.

Social Network: del.icio.us
del.icio.us submissions take around 100 – 130 bookmarks in a relatively fast time period to achive popular status, and you can expect around 20,000 unique visitors if you make it to the del.icio.us front page. Expect this number to go up, due to the recent redesign of del.icio.us!

Social Network: Reddit
Reddit submissions take anywhere from 30 – 300 votes to become popular, and you can expect just as wide a range of incoming traffic, which could be 3,000 – 30,000 unique visitors.

Social Network: Yahoo! Buzz
If a Yahoo! editor chooses your submission for inclusion in Yahoo! Buzz, you can expect to receive 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 unique visitors initially, and expect to have higher authority in the search engines now that you have an official link from Yahoo!’s website.

Social Network: Propeller
Propeller stories take around 40 votes to become popular, and you can expect to receive anywhere from 1,000 – 20,000 unique visitors. If your story gets chosen for inclusion on news.aol.com, you can receive upwards of 100,000 unique visitors, and a nice authority link from AOL.

Social Network: Mixx
Submissions to Mixx take about 30 – 50 votes to become popular, and you can expect to receive anywhere from 100 to 1,000 unique visitors, as their network is still expanding and growing their userbase.

Cheers, and remember, if you liked this post, feel free to submit it to your favorite social network! Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed as well!

Many of you probably already know, but in case you didn’t … Delicious has undergond a nice, overdue makeover, and it’s residing at it’s own dot com domain! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand its new design is totally gorgeous. Head on over and check it out now! Don’t forget to bookmark DaftSEO as well!

Delicious!

Cheers!

Social Poster is a new online application that creates an easy regimen for you (as per your criteria) to submit your article to many different social networks. You can specify to include social networks with or without dofollow links, eliminate websites by category and language, or choose Pligg based networks.

You can of course select from Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Newvine, Propeller, Google Bookmarks, and you can choose from many more social networking websites.

I’ll be using Social Poster to bookmark and spread the fire about itself! (And of course to submit my own articles to other social bookmarking websites.)

Social Networking (media, bookmarking, sharing) is not just for the one hit wonder burst of traffic that surges to your website after advancing to a social networking website’s “popular” page, there are also many long term benefits.

First, whatever you are sharing usually ends up linked directly from your profile on the social website, giving search engines one more link to find your article from. You can successfully build up your profile’s PageRank as well, giving any link from your social profile that much more link juice.

Second, if you managed to land an article on one of the “popular” pages on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Mixx, or StumbleUpon, a link to the submission on the respective website will appear on social aggregators like popurls. Popurls aggregates links from many popular social networking websites, not just the big hitters.

Third, sharing on social networking websites builds trust and authority. If a reader wants to find more information about you, or more articles written by or about you, he or she can simply do a search query on the various social networks and have the information they want in seconds.

Hooray for the digital age, huh?

P.S. TYPELiFE underwent an aesthetic revamp yesterday, how do you like it?

I don’t use it anymore, but I thought I’d make mention of a great Firefox add-on that has done wonders for me in the past. For submission of my own sites, or even submissions I was doing for other people, Shareaholic eased up my workload a TON.

Shareaholic lets you quickly submit to del.icio.us, digg, facebook, google bookmarks, ma.gnolia, reddit, stumbleupon, truemors, and twitter with a simple click. Another feature allows you to e-mail the page directly to a contact.

(Shareaholic also works on the social networking browser, Flock.)

Shana Albert of SocialDesire made a great humorous analysis of the cultures within the social networking / media economy, Wow, Social Media is a lot like High School!!

Right on the money with the “elitist bullies“, “popular & not so popular (read: band-o’s) crowds.

Even the drama, zealous representation of mascots, and “inter-site” relations.

If you’re a fan of submitting things to Social Media websites, or part of your job description entails submitting things to Social Media websites … then I can pretty much guarantee that you will make good use out of SocialMarker.

SocialMarker facilitates the use of various Social Media websites by using a single interface to submit your link to any or all of twenty eight different Social Bookmarking Services.

(Mainly: Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Slashdot, Propeller, Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Fark, and Newsvine, but the list goes on)

SocialMarker also makes it even easier by providing a Firefox toolbar to make submissions a one click process.

There’s even a widget you can install to your blogs and websites to make submissions easier for your readers!

SocialMarker requires that you have a registered account at the Social Media websites you are bookmarking to.

In your quest to become a Digg Power User … remember to take the time to weed out old diggs, dead diggs, regretted diggs, drunk diggs, and diggs of that sort that you wish you had not dugg.

Each time I weed out my Digg Profile, I find a couple of stupid and/or embarrassing links that I undigg, forever marring out that mistake from my Digg Life.

It is best to keep the Diggs in your profile as close as possible to the niche you are trying to promote. It is easiest to gain Digg buddies with a common interest and goal, hopefully helping you to get to the coveted Digg.com frontpage.