socialmedian Gains Momentum
Since socialmedian’s public launch in July of this year, the social news site has very rapidly improved on its initial offering. socialmedian continues to offer powerful news filtering tools, but over the summer, CEO Jason Goldberg and his team have added major new features on nearly a weekly basis.
Most recently, socialmedian announced a Facebook application that allows Facebook users to access most of socialmedian’s functionality without leaving Facebook.
socialmedian also recently introduced new features dubbed The Mood and Replize. The Mood in similar to FriendFeed functionality that lets socialmedian users rate stories according to their “likes” and “dislikes.” Replize mimics Twitter functionality that allows socialmedian users to interact with each other using @username short codes.
All of this product innovation is paying off for socialmedian. The social news site has nearly doubled visits in each of the last two months. Goldberg says he isn’t focused on growing unique visitors. Instead, Goldberg wants his users coming back. “The only number that matters to us is repeat visits, which are off the charts for us.” Currently, roughly 50 percent of traffic to socialmedian is from repeat visits.
A positive sign for socialmedian is the interaction happening on the site. Earlier this summer it was not uncommon for a story to receive 10-15 “clips.” Clips are a measure of a story’s importance as rated by socialmedian users. Today, it’s not uncommon for a stories appearing on socialmedian to receive 50-60 comments/clips.
Key new media influencers are also taking notice of socialmedian. They include Leo Laporte, Louis Gray and Bwana McCall, as well as writers from TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable. There are many more.
The consensus seems to be, they like what they see. The continuous iteration and feature enhancements and relentless listening appear to be paying off for the socialmedian team.
Of course, there has been no shortage of news to chat about whether it be tech news, the upcoming election or the economic downturn. And, all the news may be helping socialmedian. Still, as a news-centric site, it’s good to be the place people go to for news when it breaks. socialmedian continues to improve its facilitation of conversation around the news — a critical piece of the puzzle that has long been missing in traditional media.
