The Digg Friends You Never Knew You Had

You can easily discover 10s, maybe even 100s of existing friends on Digg, if you only knew how and where to look.

Experienced users of social news sites such as Digg will probably find most of this content familiar, but I know many that will appreciate an important reminder.

I have never seen anyone write a guide on this very important part of Digg which might appear to be obvious, however I spent a few hours browsing Digg friends, and friends of friends, and know that many will find this useful.

I should stress this is more of a social bloggers guide than for someone who spends most of their time on social networks, or the popular A list blogs, and it is only something that has become really possible over the last 6 months with the gain in popularity of blog social networking tools such as MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Bumpzee.

Starting From Scratch

This section is for those people who haven’t actually used Digg actively before.

• Set up an account on Digg using the same pseudonym and avatar as you use with MyBlogLog and other networks.
• Visit one of your favorite blogs where you often leave comments, and where the owner occasionally has some moderate Digg success. You are only really looking for stories that get 10 or 20 Diggs.

A good example is my recent story on Stumbleupon which has so far received 24 diggs.

• Take a look at who Digged the story

You will often recognise:-

• The owner of the blog (though didn’t submit their own content)
• Regular readers of the blog
• Readers of other blogs which you often frequent



Many users use the same screen name and avatars for all social networking, including MyBlogLog, thus whilst you might not immediately recognise names, you will recognise avatars.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, I am sure you will recognise many of the names, and if not, at least the avatars.

The ones you recognise the most you have probably seen on more blogs that you read, and thus have similar tastes in content. They are ideal people to add as friends, and if they recognise you, they might friend you back.

Reciprocating Friendships

Whilst people often add lots of friends, they don’t always remember to reciprocate, or sometimes even know how to check whether someone has friended them who they know.

Often these are friendships they might want to reciprocate.

If someone is reading your blog, and digging your stories, you want their Digg accounts to be as strong as possible.

I am sure you will also benefit from seeing the stories they like best, because it will help you target your content better or just enjoy using Digg more.

First of all go to your friends page…

Tucked down at the bottom of your list of friends is one of the most important links, where you see who has befriended you.

This is a page you should try to visit every time you visit Digg, or at the very least every few days.

Looking at my own page I can see that David Airey has recently added me as a friend on Digg. I know David, he is a regular reader, and I am a regular reader of his own graphic design blog.

Time to Add David as a friend so I can see what he is digging, and it also gives some more weight to his Digg account.

Friends of Friends

A little discussed tactic is to visit the friends page of your own friends, and see not only who they have friended, but more importantly who has reciprocated that friendship.
Again you are looking for familiar pseudonyms, or more than likely familiar avatars.

I know many of my Digg friends are extremely careless and are not reciprocating with people who are genuinely their friends.

Lets take a real example – one of my Digg friends is Jeremy from Jemmille.com. I know he is friends with Paul from BlogPaul.

Jemmille has been a little bit lazy, and only has 7 friends – that can’t be right, Jemmille is a really outgoing guy.

Jemmille actually has 4 people who have befriended him on Digg, but he hasn’t reciprocated, even though he knows them. It is not just Paul he has forgotten to friend back, he hasn’t reciprocated my invite either!

But while I am here I have the opportunity to add both Paul Hunter and Alex Bamo to my own friends. Paul is a reader, and Alex has a related blog about money and is interested in similar things.

Maybe I should add a few more?

I could for instance take a look at Lyndon’s friends and see if I recognise anyone. He writes about SEO in Cornwall and has almost 300 friends although only 96 have friended him back.
He also has a few people he hasn’t reciprocated with that I recognise.

I suppose at this point I should add a warning, you can only add a few friends at a time, and then go and make a coffee. That is one of the reasons it is worth keeping up-to-date.

Extended Network

There are number of advantages of this method of enhancing your network of friends on Digg.

1. The people you add as friends are people you already know, so you will generally find the content they suggest more interesting.
2. If you are known to the other people, they are more likely to reciprocate, and the content you Digg will most likely be relevant to them.
3. You are strenghtening the Digg profiles of the people who read your blog, and the blogs with which you interact.

If you happen to Digg this Post, don’t forget to add me as a friend as well, and spare a few minutes checking who has friended you recently, and maybe reciprocating.

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*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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