5 Stumble Tips : Building a Good Following Base on StumbleUpon

A while back I did a couple posts on stumbling because I was often asked how to do something. If you missed them or want to revisit:  How to Customize Your Stumble Profile and How to Stumble PhotoBlog. While writing those post I had a handful of additional StumbleUpon post in my head that I had intended to write. Today I’m back on the StumbleUpon path and sharing a few of those ideas with you.

I wanted to tackle the subject of “Following Stumblers” and why I think it is important to chose carefully. In addition to choosing who you follow I also believe it is important to stay on top of your followers and weed through them, for a lack of a better terms.

Tip #1: First and fore most no matter what you are using StumbleUpon for you want to align yourself with like stumblers. The reason for this is you want to be able to share your stumbles and have them reach people that are interested in them. You want people to give them a thumbs up and not a thumbs down. When deciding to follow someone look at the box in the bottom of the right side bar to see how you match up. As you can see by this image I am more compatible with the stumbler on the left then I am with the stumbler on the right.

  Tip #2: If your purpose in stumbling is to help amplify your post and get it out to the masses in hopes of additional traffic you will also want to concentrate on the number of followers your stumblers have. So in addition to your compatibility you will want to see how many people are currently following the stumbler. The thought behind this is simple. If your stumbler has 1,000 people following them and they “thumbs up” your post then there is a better chance of those 1,000 people seeing your stumble and their followers seeing it and so forth. It is a domino effect. You want to try to reach as many stumblers as you can.

Tip #3: If you follow someone and you are interested in sharing your stumbles with them and plan on reciprocating send them a message via StumbleUpon to let them know you are a new follower and would love to exchange shares. From my own experience I am more likely to follow someone back if they send me a message such as this. The more people that are willing to share stumbles with you the better chance you have of your stumble gaining activity.

Tip #4: If you are in need of followers the best way to gain them is to follow people in hopes they will follow you back. I encourage you to follow the first three tips before you blindly start following people.  One way to find followers is to look through the followers of a stumbler you enjoy. Hopefully this will hook you up with stumblers of the same interest. You can also join StumbleUpon Groups to find followers with the same interest.

Tip #5: This tip I think is over looked often and not even thought about by some. At this time StumbleUpon only allows you to follow 500 people. So if you exhaust your 500 you will not be able to follow anyone else. You want to make sure those 500 count. You want your stumblers to pack some power and MOST of all you want them to be active. Once a month or every couple of weeks I will weed through those I am following and unfollow inactive stumblers. There is not point in following someone that is inactive, they will not be looking at your stumbles nor will they be adding any for you to view (I hold this same concept with Twitter). So my suggestion is to bring up your list of those you are following and go to the very last page. I believe that StumbleUpon list users based on activity and find almost always those on my last page have been inactive for a few months if not more. Begin by unfollowing users from the last page working your way back deciding on your on cut off of what you consider an active stumbler.

Note: I believe StumbleUpon only allows you to follow 25 followers a day. I do not remember if this is 25 actions or 25 followers. Meaning if you unfollow 25 people will you still be able to follow people that day. I recall at one point I unfollowed some people and was then restricted from unfollowing or following any more. You may have to test this to figure out the point at which you are unable to follow or unfollow users. If you just do a little each day or week you should soon find yourself building a good following base.