I’ve recently come across StumbleUpon and for someone who struggles to keep up to date with their bookmarks it’s a pretty good tool to use to share what you like with your friends, your peers, your family etc.

Social media is turning into really big business. Twitter, Facebook continue to post impressive growth in terms of users, indeed if you saw the post we did on Facebook Facts and Figures even though that research was done only 9 days ago there are already so many more Facebook users than on the 7th March and Twitter is experiencing even faster growth.

Well, with 7.2 million members using StumbleUpon it is a social networking lightweight, call it second tier. That said, with the service you can do pretty cool things.

So what can you do with StumbleUpon ?

Good question. Here are just some of the things you can use the site for :

• Random surfing – perfect for killing time on your mobile phone or at the end of your lunch. You can set up preferences of the sorts of sites you want to StumbleUpon and it will do it randomly based on popularity.
• Save and share your bookmarks.
• Download a StumbleUpon toolbar and use it to thumbs up or thumbs down the sites that you visit while Stumbling.
• View StumbleUpon channels, including News, Videos, Art, Music, Sports, Technology and more.
• Add friends to your profile so you can Stumble the things they like, it’s akin to having thumnails of their bookmarks.
• Make new friends by meeting people that share your interests.
• But here is the killer – you can advertise on StumbleUpon.

So, in the random sites served as part of your Stumble based on what you say your interests are – i.e. you are a man, living in California, interested in golf, dating tips, electronic devices and travel then you will see sites served up in those categories. Some of the sites shown will be paid ads, and,  the more people like the sites (aka your ad) you show (so notice no keyword, no title, no description) the more your sites get shown to other Stumblers with similar interests, and the traffic costs 5 cents only per view.

You can set up campaigns to have a certain budget per day, so no nasty surprises on your credit card bill. You can choose to receive a certain number of visitors (between 100 and 5000 per day, not sure what happens if it goes above that, but I doubt many will venture above that, unless it becomes extremely popular.

You can choose certain pages, ideal if you are an affiliate with landing pages for certain offers.

The only thing we didn’t like was that they only seem to take PayPal at the present time, but no doubt this will change eventually.

In terms of demographic targeting :

You can target by Country.

You can target by US or Canadian State.

You can target by  Major global City (so Dublin, Glasgow London, Bangalore…….New York, Vancouver)

You can target by sex (not whether you have it or not)

You can target by age (from 18), but it goes up in chunks of 5 years until you get to 99.

If nothing else, spend $25 (the minimum to populate an account, it will be good research. The number of users shown above is in hundreds of thousands. So for health they have 290,000 users.

They provide reporting on number of times your page showed and how many thumbs up vs. thumbs down it got. Might be useful as a way of doing some usability tests in advance of spending money on other traffic generation methods.