happy-rabbit.jpgIf you have been around the social space at all lately, you are bound to have heard of Mixx.

To put it into context, it’s a sort of cross between Digg, LinkedIn and MyYahoo. In a nutshell, its a social network that lets you find and share news based on your interests and location.

Even before Mixx launched, it received quite a bit of hype and some even suggested it might grow to replace the social media powerhouse Digg.

So based on all the coverage Mixx had received, including some personal recommendations from some Mixx advocates, we wanted to give it a fair shot and test it out.

I think it is important to point out that as a marketer, you are looking to find a way to use social media as a platform to give your content or sites a large amount of visibility in a short time. Although participating in a community that you enjoy is a nice bonus, it is not a priority or a requirement to be successful in social media as a marketer.

The above understanding is what I went with when testing out the site, and this article does not reflect whether or not I personally like the site structure, design, and functionality, which as a marketer, I could care less about.

Test Case 1:

On November 23, 2007, we submitted this story, Kegadoru: Injured Idol Fetish, to Mixx. http://www.mixx.com/stories/16356/. This was submitted on a weekday morning and went to the front page quickly.

Mixx sent 147 UVs to the site over a 7 day period.

The same article was submitted to Digg, where it received only 56 votes and did not make the front page.
Digg sent 89 UVs to the site over a 7 day period.

Google sent 265 UVs, UniqueDaily.com sent 1,289, and StumbleUpon sent 2,239 during that same period of time.

sad-trix.jpgNeedless to say, I was not overly impressed with the results we got from a front page story and decided to give up on Mixx for the time being and give it a few months to grow and mature.

Brian Wallace remarked that since my initial test of Mixx, there had been an increase in traffic and activity. TechCrunch also mentioned that Compete was showing traffic on Mixx to be rising dramatically. I decided that maybe a second look at Mixx was in order.

Luckily a friend of mine Chris Winfeild, President of 10e20 and social media expert, was also testing out Mixx and was kind enough to share his results, giving us our second look at Mixx.

Test Case 2:

Around January 2, 2008, Chris’s article, Why Social Marketing is Critical to the Internet Marketing Mixx, was submitted to Mixx. http://www.mixx.com/stories/49836/. This article also made it quickly to the front page with69 votes, which is a ton for Mixx.

Mixx sent 43 UVs to the site.

Again, the results clearly indicate, from a marketers’ point of view, using Mixx does not justify the time and energy spent. With over a hundred social media communities and sites to choose from, you should probably pass on using Mixx for marketing purposes.

However, I am hopeful that more people will find Mixx to be a community they want to participate in, so that at some point, it will become a viable solution for social media marketing, but until that day comes… I will stay out of the Mixx.

**Traffic is used in this article only as a metric to gauge activity. The real value in social media is not through conversions or traffic, although that might be your ROI metric, but rather the value is in the links you can get from the mass exposure your content receives.

Links result in better search rankings and higher quality, second tier, traffic from sites you are being linked from.

{{{"type":"anchor", "ring":"0", "page":"0"}}}