Digg it like The Telegraph for news success

Digg – a sometimes fun, but essentially useless, way to spike your site with foreign traffic or an essential tool for SEO? North Yorkshire based search expert Patrick Altoft urged journalists to think again about the American giant during a session on integrating social media into news operations at yesterday’s Digital Editor’s Network.

Patrick has often been faced with the argument that there’s little point for newspaper editors in working to get their content on the front page of Digg to receive a flood of traffic which can not be monetised with local advertisers in the UK but he put forward a different way of looking at it.

“A lot of newspaper editors believe there’s no real value in Digg because they are foreigners, they are not even going to see the ads and most people from Digg leave within three seconds.

“The key thing to remember is that you will, on average, get 300 links every day – that’s a lot of links to get every month”.

Yes it’s all about link love.

The hundreds of links which succeeding in Digg will create, will boost search engine positioning and could ultimately result in that audience which can be monetised hitting your site. And he revealed how The Telegraph is putting Digg right at the heart of its strategy to build audience by having an SEO expert working alongside journalists in the newsroom – even before the story is created – and ensuring every possible optimisation before it’s published and that all important one-hit-only Google spidering takes place.

“The Telegraph has SEO and social media people in the newsroom. There needs to be somebody involved from the social media team before the content is created, research exactly what people are talking about. After creation, it’s back to the SEO team to find out whether it’s been optimised.”

And promotion of the story after publication is also vital, he said. “Journalists at The Telegraph are encouraged to submit stories to Digg. “How many journalists, after the story is written, work on promoting that story? This is where bloggers are different.” He recommends setting up an automated promotion network which involves TSS, Twitter, email subscriptions and Google news pings within 30mins of publication to get the first-mover advantage on any story.

It was a fascinating and useful presentation for anyone concerned with gaining social media relevance in a news org and the full slide set is here and you can Digg this here.

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Of course, Digg isn’t the only game in town and earlier in the afternoon those attending the sesssion At UCLAN in Preston heard how another mighty player, The Guardian, is reaping success with Twitter.

Robin Goard from Hitwise told the group that 54% of Twitter traffic is going downstream to what it classified as media sites – news, entertainments, blogs etc.

And The Guardian was winning out with not just the home page featuring in the top statistics, but also the technology and comment is free sections where personality journalists such as Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss were credited with developing the networks to drive traffic.