The most effective channels for sharing your content

I often review the performance of my blogging efforts and use several metrics as part of this review process.  One metric is simply channel payback, the number of referrals that an individual channel, network, or social community delivers in terms of page views for my content.

A year ago I would generally share blog posts on Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  Sometimes I would share post on other channels as well but these were the channels I used most often.  Where do I share my blog posts today?  In general I now only share content on StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, and sometimes LinkedIn and have seen no loss in the return on this investment as I rarely saw traffic coming from the other networks anyway.

With this in mind I wasn’t surprised when I read that “StumbleUpon Tops Facebook As Social Media Traffic Source“.  Yes, according to StatCounter StumbleUpon accounted for 43.34% of all social media traffic in the United States in December of 2010.  Facebook remains number one worldwide but fell to the number two position in December in the United States.  Yes, number two worldwide is Stumbleupon.

• Are you using StumbleUpon?  If yes, join me there.  If not, join the service.
• Install the StumbleUpon toolbar and start sharing content, yours and other interesting content.

I am not suggesting you give up other channels that are working for you today.  However, if you are sharing your content on multiple channels I hope you taking the time to review their payback vs. the amount of time you are spending to get the word out.  If not, get started today.