Last month, Brafton reported that Digg got a facelift and several brands were creating content marketing campaigns for the social site. While brands were interested in the updated Digg, a lot of users were dissatisfied, participating in a Ditch Digg day following the launch of the redesign, flooding the sites Top News' page with links to competing social bookmarking site Reddit. Now, the company's new CEO has introduced himself and announced some upcoming features that could make the social bookmarking site more appealing to users and marketers.
Matt Williams, the new chief executive officer, made his first public blog post this morning. He apologized to members about the rocky launch of Digg v4. Then, he started talking about new tools the company will release to improve users' experiences – and marketers may be interested in how these features will facilitate news-finding on Digg.
To start, the company has brought back the "Upcoming" section to potentially make it easier for new stories to be found. It will also soon recover the "bury button" per users' requests. For marketers, this button could help them shape their content strategies by providing insight on what kind of articles users do not like.
Williams says the company will also be testing a new Top News algorithm as well as filters and navigation tools for images and videos. These features may serve to create a more intuitive search experience on the site so users can more easily find and share news content published on Digg.
Brands developing content marketing strategies for this quarter may want to consider including Digg in their campaigns. If these proposed updates live up to their potential, the bookmarking site could become an important part of the online news-sharing landscape.
But whether consumers "digg" the updated site or not, creating news content and sharing it on social sites could be critical to boosting a brand. As Brafton has reported in the past, news content drives the most traffic to Facebook and Twitter, and a CNN study recently found that nearly one-third of consumers favor brands they associate with news content found on social sites.
