Wes Cutshall

If you don’t know what StumbleUpon is, then you’re missing out on something awesome. StumbleUpon is a website discovery engine. You tell it what you’re interests are and it shows you sites you should like. You then “stumble” through a collection of websites by clicking a “stumble” button, over and over, viewing different websites – often for hours. Add all the standard voting and sharing options you would expect and you have StumbleUpon. A social, viral, website discovery engine. Getting a website to be popular in StumbleUpon has been compared to the Digg effect. If you run websites, you absolutely want to be stumbled.

What is StumbleUpon Paid Discovery?

Just like getting to the top of Digg, it’s not easy to get a high volume of stumbles. If you’re launching a new website, or simply need to boost traffic to an existing website, StumbleUpon offers a creative form of advertising called Paid Discovery. Paid Discovery simply means that StumbleUpon shows “sponsored” sites in some of the stumble slots, based on user’s “interests.” StumbleUpon sets aside 5% of stumbles to use for Paid Discovery.

When you set up a Paid Discovery campaign you choose (optionally) the interests and demographics you want to target for your stumbles. As your campaign runs, StumbleUpon users will be presented with your full website as they stumble. Most users will not notice that your website is a sponsored site even though StumbleUpon does mark each paid stumble as “sponsored.” If you have a website that “people just have to see” then StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is for you. Especially if you are launching a new concept that users aren’t yet Googling for.

My Experience with Paid Discovery

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a great way to try to get your website to go viral. This is the exciting part about Paid Discovery. If users, while viewing your paid stumble, “like” your site, you can earn free stumbles. If your website is popular enough you can even earn thousands of free visitors in one day. In a recent campaign Timeline Collage received 1,600+ free stumbles in a day while only paying for two hundred. Enough of the paid users “liked” Timeline Collage that we got over a thousand free views of our website. This happened twice over a 5-day test period. I have not been able to find an explanation on StumbleUpon of exactly what it takes to get free stumbles. When I contacted the Paid Discovery twitter account they replied to my query with a generic link that doesn’t go into much detail about the formula for getting free stumbles. In my experience the social interactions on StumbleUpon, in relation to your site, can result in large amounts of free stumbles when using Paid Discovery. As expected, the more viral your concept is the more likely it is to receive free traffic on StumbleUpon. Conversely, the less viral your concept the “more” you’re going to pay to get traffic from StumbleUpon.

Conclusion

There are a few options and features within Paid Discovery that I’m not covering here, such as the option to choose a “serving priority” that can affect your stumble price from $0.05 per stumble up to $0.25 per stumble. If you’re even slightly interested in Paid Discovery I suggest you sign up for an account and start a campaign to see what your options are. I expect over time StumbleUpon will be tweaking Paid Discovery to make it even more useful to those of use who are always launching websites.

I just signed up for Klout and was poking around on my personal profile. I noticed that some of my websites already had Klout profiles that I had not created. At first I thought that fans had taken it upon themselves to create accounts for the websites, but after reading the FAQ I found that Klout will create accounts, at will, from existing Twitter accounts that it discovers. I don’t know if there are any criteria for this, but it’s clearly stated that they do this. So I realized that this is most likely what happened. The question I had was, “How do I now claim this Klout account as mine?” since I own the websites. The FAQ does not cover this topic at all. So here is what I discovered.

To claim a Kout account that was automatically created for a Twitter account that you own:

1. While signed in as your personal Klout account click the account that you want to claim. You either noticed it in your Influencers list or search for it using the search box. Copy the URL of the profile.
2. Then you must sign into Twitter.com as that account. I have an account for every website that I tweet from, but I’m never logged in as these accounts. After signing into Twitter as the desired account, visit the Klout profile that you copied.
3. Klout will provide you with a “Connect with Facebook” or “Sign in with Twitter” option. You want to sign in with Twitter.
4. You will now sign in to Klout using the Twitter username and password of the account which you want to “claim.”
5. Once you have done this you have essentially connected the two accounts. You can now use Klout as this account (when signed in to Twitter as this account) and clean up any data that you want.
6. Here is a list of things to do once you claim your account.

If you don’t already know, Facebook has opened up their data for some, regulated, 3rd party use. Facebook calls this their Open Graph API (application programming interface). Any developer who follows the specified steps can create applications that integrate with Facebook user data. Facebook does apply limitations on how developers can use the data in order to protect Facebook users. But, for the most part, if a Facebook user agrees, you can gain access to just about all of their profile data, and even post to their wall, etc.

Getting Started

Before you can start developing with Facebook you’ll need to register an application (yet to be developed) with Facebook. Start on the Facebook Developers page and then go to the Apps tab. I’m not going to go into detail about this because it’s pretty straight forward and already written about everywhere on the web. To make getting to the data easier there is a PHP SDK for Facebook Open Graph. We will be using this library for all of our Facebook queries.

Permissions

Before you can get to any data a user is going to first have to grant your application access to specific parts of their data. Facebook has different data and actions sectioned into permission groups. Below is an example of requesting permissions to get a user’s email address, bio data (name, etc), and to be able to read their wall.

$config = array(
‘appId’ => FBAPPID,
‘secret’ => FBAPPSECRET,
);

$facebook = new Facebook($config);
$fbuserid = $facebook->getUser();

$params = array(
“scope” => “read_stream,email,user_about_me”,
“redirect_uri” => “http://www.wescutshall.com/”
);

$loginurl = $facebook->getLoginUrl($params);

This will result in a variable, $loginurl, that you can use to create a hyperlink that points to Facebook and prompts the user to accept or deny the request for the specific permissions for your app. Assuming the user clicks “allow”, the user will be directed back to your website and you will now magically be able to query the information via the SDK. This $loginurl could replace your website’s “sign in” link if you wanted to simply force every user to have a Facebook account (and accept your app’s permissions). If a user has already given your application access to the data requested in the $loginurl url, Facebook will simply send the user to the redirect_uri, which should be your user dashboard/profile page. Some data, such as a user’s stream, is explicitly shown on a seperate permissions step on Facebook during the access granting process. A user will first allow you access to their bio data, and then they will allow or deny access to their stream. Should a user only allow access to their bio, and not their stream, the user will be bounced back to this permissions screen anytime your application attempts to access stream data. This actually integrates really nicely with web apps and keeps you from having to do constant error checking on data you’re asking for from Facebook.

Requesting Data

Below is an example of requesting the bio information:

//unique identifier on Facebook
$fbuserid = $facebook->getUser();

$user_profile = $facebook->api(‘/me’,'GET’);

$fname = $user_profile["first_name"];
$lname = $user_profile["last_name"];
$email = $user_profile["email"];  //this was a separate permission, remember?

Requesting wall/stream information:

$feed = $facebook->api(‘/me/feed’,'GET’);
for ($i=0;$i<count($feed["data"]);$i++)
{
// do something, like reading all shared links – $feed["data"][$i]["link"]
}

You could also check to see if a user has already liked your Facebook page:

$url = “/me/likes/$pageid”;
$like = $facebook->api($url,’GET’);
if($like["data"][0]["id"] != $pageid)
{
//do something, like suggest they like your page, or hide content until they do
}

This is just an intro into getting data from Facebook from PHP using the Open Graph API and Facebook PHP SDK. Facebook dogs and Google should be able to answer most of your questions.

UPDATE: After writing this initial review it has come to my attention that FanPageHookup acquires Facebook likes through shady methods. I have spoken with many new fans who liked my website who had definitely not, knowingly, liked my FB page. I’m researching what the exact method FPH has used, but be warned that you will not be acquiring willing likes for your FB page. This could be bad in the long-run if many of your fans start marking your updates as spam just because they don’t understand why they are showing in their news stream.

Buy Facebook Fans – FanPageHookup.com

In doing research for a new product I purchased a fan package from FanPageHookup.com. Fan Page Hookup offers packages of different volumes of new Facebook fans for your Facebook page. If you need to bulk up your FB fan-base you can simply purchase new fans.

For my research I paid $271 for 2,000 US fans. After a few days of nothing happening the fans started to increase. At a rate of a few hundred a day the fans kept coming in the following days. Within about a week my FB page was plus 2,000 in fans (UPDATE: plus 4,000 fans in 3 weeks). I did a lot of browsing of the new fan profiles to see if they appeared to be legit. I think for the most part the pages are real FB users. I did find it surprising, though, that most of the profiles were 100% locked from public view. The profiles that were not locked did seem to have a lot of friends and seemed to be legit profiles. The only real negative I found was that the overwhelming demographic of the FB profiles liking the page were high school teenagers. This is probably due to whatever minimal compensation the website offers to it’s users for liking pages. As far as bulking up for sheer numbers, this causes no problem. If, however, you expect some sort of traffic increase or social marketing benefit in acquiring a few thousands fans, this website will not provide you this. I noticed no increase at all in traffic to the website for which I purchased 2K fans for.

I think overall the product is as described. If you want your fan count to jump up, you’ll get it. If this has any real benefit, you have to decide.