5 Power Tips For StumbleUpon Users

by Abhijeet on June 10, 2008

in Social Networking

StumbleUpon, without a doubt, is my favorite social networking site. It’s certainly the most innovative among the social media sites and helps users discover and share content through a toolbar.

Like every other tool or network which you use, you can understand more about StumbleUpon if you are actively involved in stumbling articles and trying out its different features.

Today, I’d like to share 5 power tips for all those who are planning to use or have been using this wonderful social media site and we hope that it helps you to further utilize it in a more efficient manner.

1: Stumble Friends’ Favorites

If you are ignoring those who have befriended you on stumble, then you are making a big mistake. Like any other social network, stumbleupon too has a nice and strong community and you can be a part of that only when you take time out and stumble through your friends’ favorites.

stumble friends favorites

Not only this helps you to know about your fellow stumblers’ interests, but also helps you in developing a relationship with them.

2: Stumble Through Tags

The stumble toolbar has lot of options to let you find websites in different fields. But there is also a very nice hidden feature which lets you search through different tags of your choice. It can be done in 2 ways.

First method- Go to Tools in your toolbar and then toolbar options. There make sure the search option with a magnifying glass is enabled. And then you get a small magnifying glass in your toolbar. You can use to stumble through a particular term.

stumble2

Second method- You could also have the search bar right there in the toolbar. For that you need to go to Tools->Toolbar Options->Configuration (at the top )-> check Show search/tag box.

stumble search

This enables the search box in your toolbar and you can just type a term in that, lets say ‘ productivity ‘ and you can keep on stumbling through different sites which are related to this term or which have been tagged as productivity by other stumblers.

3: Review Friends’ Profiles

You should also give a thumbs up to your fellow stumblers’ profiles and add a review. Its a nice way to say that you like his/her stumbles and further strengthen the relationship.

4: Analyze Friends

Once in a while you should visit each of your friend’s profile and check their activity. Last time when I did a stumble friends’ analysis, I found that 3 of the friends had been already banned due to some reason and 4 friends were inactive since a long time. Hence I decided to unfriend them.

Similarly you could check to see if you have some inactive friends and if its time to remove them. You can just go to a profile and see when was the last login. If its like 3 weeks or 1 month ago then you can unfriend them.

stumble4

I think 3 weeks time frame should be good because that gives the time for any vacation which the stumbler might have taken in this period.

5: Get that Wrong Tag Corrected

We know that its very important to use the right categories and tags while submitting articles to stumble. Thats how the article reaches the right audience and gets the attention which it deserves.

But what to do when you encounter a nice article submitted under the wrong category? Well, you can get it changed. The best way to do it would be to send a polite message to the person who submitted that article and ask him to change it to the right category. He can do it from the bottom right portion of the review page.

stumble5

If you find that he is unwilling to change the category then you could always report it (as you can see in the screenshot below )

stumble6



I hope that the above tips help you to make your stumbleupon experience a better one and further contribute to the community. Let us know about your experience of using stumbleupon in the comments.

If you like this post then please Stumble it and bookmark it on delicious. We’d appreciate that. Thanks.

{ 4 trackbacks }

» 5 Power Tips For StumbleUpon Users 3 Some: What The World Is Saying About 3 Some
06.10.08 at 8:10 pm
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» 7 power tips to get lots of useful backlinks and traffic » Binaryday
06.17.08 at 12:55 am
How to Get the Most Out of StumbleUpon [Tips] : Zaphu
06.27.08 at 2:07 am

{ 18 comments }

Sumesh 06.10.08 at 9:47 pm

Good tips - I think I’ll have to do stumbling of friends’ favs a bit. Never done that before.

And one of my friends could do well with the last point - she regularly finds and frowns upon wrongly categorized stumbles (and does not try to correct it, I think).

There are a few follow up points to this, but I’ll spare that for a post on Blog Creativity. :)

Congratz on your post on FSw, Abhijeet.

Keith Dsouza 06.10.08 at 9:59 pm

quite a nice list, I like the stumble friends favorites and stumble the tags features. Even though the SU toolbar sits in almost all my browsers I have never made much use of those buttons

Madhur Kapoor 06.11.08 at 12:51 am

Nice tips buddy. I will try Stumbling through Tags. never done that before.

UtahLuxury.com 06.11.08 at 10:26 am

Nice tips! I love stumbleupon as well and didnt even think to try some of these out. Thanks for the ideas!

ajay 06.11.08 at 5:47 pm

i installed the stuble toolbar but only using the “i like ” button. now i will try to use some other buttons also.

Sandy 06.12.08 at 2:11 am

I’ve been getting a larger percentage of duplicate content on my stumbles of late. When I first found SU it was great as every page was new and entertaining but now every other page is a rip-off and very un-original. Seeing as your post gets some SU traffic would you consider doing a post on reporting duplicate content? I report mine or put a polite comment on blogs as I find them but I am only one man and the more who are aware that they can report it and help clean up the SU roster the better.
Thanks

Abhijeet 06.12.08 at 2:33 am

Sandy, I am not sure what do you consider as duplicate content. If you find people talking about same product on different blogs, then thats not really duplicate because everyone likes to present his point of view.

Moreover in case of stumbleupon it’s pretty hard to find out if a similar story has already been submitted to stumble. Hence you may come across stories which appear to be duplicate , while stumbling.

Rhoid 06.12.08 at 7:28 am

Since joining ,I have just been stumbling around. I will now know more about where I stumble on StumbleUpon.
Thanks

Ashish Mohta 06.12.08 at 2:00 pm

Stumbling what friends already did is the only thing I find can make others stumble your posts. I ad already been doing it since I learned how stumble groups failed.

With my personal experience i always get stumble back from people like this. Moreover it might get people back to your profile also.

However there is one big disadvantage. You dont find things before any body else did. You might say its already found by somebody and thats the reason its there but there are chances that if you hit the recent stumbles first you might make a news.

IMHO
Ashish

Matt 06.14.08 at 7:18 pm

great tips - i’m going to go ahead and stumble the friends stuff right now.

wheelnut53 06.22.08 at 11:40 pm

I’m glad its not mandatory to associate with other people . sometimes I’m here everyday sometimes I don’t log on for weeks. I just want to cure my boredom and enjoy myself

Nairobian 09.04.08 at 11:33 am

thanks for sharing the tip, im trying to make the most out of stumble upon!

tommy 09.05.08 at 9:14 am

Thanks for the tips….

Rize 09.27.08 at 4:14 pm

Very Nice Article ,.. Before reading your article i thought that Stumble Upon and its toolbar is a shit because its not generating traffic for me.
but now i am getting good out stumble.
Love You.

Translation 10.25.08 at 6:51 pm

Very good article, that helped me to change a category at a blog… Thanks for sharing :)

Saving Money Tips 11.11.08 at 10:11 pm

Actually I got banned for a false accusation from that site. Even when I barely stumbled. Thanks for tip.

Anup 01.23.09 at 4:24 pm

@Sandy

There’s a new addition to the stumbleupon toolbar now, by which you can give the “thumbs down” for repeated content. There’s a dropdown menu next to the thumbs down button, which allows you to choose why you’re giving the site a thumbs down - Not-for-me, Stumbled this recently or Too much like this lately.

Paul Morales 02.24.09 at 12:09 am

Thanks for sharing. I just signed up for stumble upon myself and theres tons of interesting articles to read.

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