You Reap What You Sow: Examining Seeding Platforms

Seeding platforms are free content distribution tools that help marketers amplify reach by placing content in front of engaged, interest-driven audiences. Seeding platforms work by enabling users to share, rate, and archive content across social networks, driving organic traffic and extending content shelf-life beyond the initial publish date.

Below is a comparison of the key seeding platforms covered in this guide:

What Is Digg and How Does It Work as a Seeding Platform?

Digg is a news aggregator seeding platform, founded in 2004 in San Francisco, that surfaces content people are actively discussing and sharing online. Content that resonates can be “dugg” by users, making it visible to everyone visiting digg.com who wants to see what is viral on any given day. Digg is an active marketing channel when used correctly.

Digg is comparable to Reddit in structure, but it offers distinct advantages as a content seeding platform:

• Build a following within Digg by consistently sharing and liking content relevant to your subject matter
• Add a Digg button directly to your content to encourage on-site shares
• Connect your Digg account to Twitter so every “digg” action sends a notifying tweet linking back to the content itself

What Is Storify and Why Does It Extend Content Reach?

Storify is a social networking seeding platform where users build stories using content drawn from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is not a simple republishing tool. Storify is a narrative layer that combines individual posts, photos, and tweets with original text to create highly shareable, context-rich content. Our influencer marketing services cover creator sourcing, briefing and measurement.

Storify extends the shelf-life and impact of your social media posts while letting you develop shareable content stories from real audience interactions. For example:

1. Publish a blog article across your main social media platforms.
2. Collect the resulting comments, likes, and replies from each platform.
3. Use Storify to combine those interactions (a comment from Instagram, a reply on Twitter, a reaction on Facebook) into a single, cohesive story.
4. Add your own narrative text to give the elements context.
5. Publish the story, making your audience feel included and validated by your brand, which in turn increases shares and drives exposure.

What Is StumbleUpon and How Does It Drive Seeding Platform Traffic?

StumbleUpon is a content recommendation seeding platform, launched in 2001, designed to help users discover and share content that might otherwise remain off the radar. Strong, engaging content can drive itself through organic stumbles, highly valuable, intent-driven shares that bring genuinely interested visitors to your site.

To get the most from StumbleUpon as a seeding platform:

• Add StumbleUpon badges to your content alongside standard social sharing buttons
• Use Su.pr., StumbleUpon’s own URL shortening tool, links open your content with a StumbleUpon toolbar at the top of the page, enabling instant sharing
• Build a following within StumbleUpon by linking your account to Twitter and Facebook

What Is Del.icio.us and How Does It Function as a Seeding Platform?

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking seeding platform that operates as a folksonomy, a system for placing publicly available tags on online content to aid re-finding and sharing. It is non-hierarchical: to find the latest content on any topic, a user navigates directly to a tag URL, such as http://delicious.com/tag/trump, which surfaces the most recently shared content on that subject.

Del.icio.us is a discovery tool and a content archive that signals quality and authority. When content is archived on Del.icio.us, it is considered worth returning to, referencing, and sharing repeatedly.

Seeding your content on Del.icio.us provides two core benefits:

• High-quality content receives more views as users share it through the tagging system
• Examining how users tag your content reveals which markets and audience segments it is speaking to, informing future content marketing strategy

Frequently Asked Questions About Seeding Platforms

What are seeding platforms in content marketing?

Seeding platforms are free or low-cost distribution channels (including news aggregators, social bookmarking sites, and content recommendation engines) that help marketers place content in front of engaged audiences to drive organic traffic and shares.

Which seeding platform is best for building a content following?

Digg is well-suited to building an internal following because users can follow accounts, share content, and have their activity automatically pushed to Twitter. StumbleUpon is effective for driving high-intent organic traffic through its recommendation engine.

How does Storify differ from other seeding platforms?

Storify differs from other seeding platforms because it lets marketers build entirely new, shareable stories by combining social media interactions from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with original narrative text.

What is a folksonomy and how does Del.icio.us use it?

A folksonomy is a non-hierarchical, user-driven tagging system for organising online content. Del.icio.us uses folksonomies so that any user can tag and categorise content publicly, making it discoverable to anyone searching that tag, without editorial gatekeeping.

Are these seeding platforms free to use?

Yes. Digg, Storify, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us are all free seeding platforms. Their value to content marketers comes from the organic reach, audience engagement, and archiving capabilities they provide at no cost.