This social networking site has been one of the harder sites to learn and navigate for me. It took me several months to really get the hang of it. It will work best if you follow people in your niche or with similar interests. Like most social networking sites it's best when you share and follow others too! You will learn more by joining and poking around on it.
You'll need to download the StumbleUpon tool bar to use this website to its fullest - I like it on my Firefox browser. It makes it easier to use when surfing the web. When you like something you give it a thumbs up. You can also give a thumbs down if you dislike it. You may also download the apps for your smart phone, available both on IPhone and Droid.
According to Forbes, back in January 2011 StumbleUpon sent more social media traffic than Facebook to websites. StumbleUpon accounted for approximately 43% of the U.S. social media traffic on January 1st, while Facebook accounted for about 38%. It also points out that there are 13 million users on StumbleUpon compared to at that time Facebook's 500 million. (It will be interesting to see new stats that will include Google+ in the mix too.)
Having seen traffic from StumbleUpon to our websites we also noticed it caused a higher bounce rate. I had done some research and could not come to any conclusions. I put the question out on Quora recently and you can read the answer I received here from StumbleUpon's Social Media Manager, Katie Gray.
She quoted " As you know, StumbleUpon takes you from one page to another that's likely on a different domain. So even if a StumbleUpon user stumbles to your page and spends, say, 20 minutes engaging with your content, once they stumble to the next page, this visit will still count as a bounce because the user didn't click to another page within one domain. Similarly, the time on site metric registers as zero unless the user clicks a link on the landing page, even if that user spends several minutes (or more) enjoying content on that page."
