Digg Digg Gets A Facelift! The Buffer Boys Are On Board

If you are a WordPress blogger and like your social media sharing, you are no doubt familiar with Digg Digg. One of the most popular social sharing plugins available, Digg Digg allows you to strategically place sharing buttons throughout your blog – whether it be at a specific place in your blog posts, in a floating in a bar besides your content, or elsewhere.

As ratings on the WordPress plugin repository indicate, Digg Digg has not been without its problems in the past – its rating currently sits at 3½ stars. But the boys over at Buffer (a popular tweet-scheduling tool) are hoping to change that. They have taken over development of the plugin, and have grand aspirations for its future functionality.

With the new release of the plugin being made available just last week, I took the opportunity to ask a few questions of Leo Widrich – co-founder of Buffer. Here’s what he had to say.

You have recently taken over development of Digg Digg – what are your plans for the plugin?

Getting Digg Digg on board was a big step for us. The key plan we have is to turn Digg Digg into a super powerful sharing plugin for WordPress. With well over 300,000 downloads, we believe it is already a fantastic solution.

In the future, we want to firstly integrate a large number of sharing services and customization options to make it extremely flexible for any WordPress user. We also plan to simplify the user experience a lot further, so that setting up a nice sharing bar for your blog is easier than ever.

Why should people use Digg Digg over comparable plugins?

A great number of awesome sharing plugins already exist. But with Digg Digg, I believe we have a great solution if you are looking for a floating bar, just like Mashable or WPMU has for example (Tom: WPMU’s floating bar is created by the Floating Social plugin). We focused on improving the design a lot recently, so if that is an important aspect for you, I hope it makes Digg Digg a good option.

As the last aspect, we focused on providing a large number of sharing buttons, for both the floating bar, or the normal button options. So if having a very flexible sharing plugin is important to you, I also hope Digg Digg will be a good option to look into.

What kind of features do you have in the pipeline for Digg Digg?

That’s a great question. The key features to incorporate at this point are more sharing buttons to choose from. We have already started with Pinterest and Buffer. We are also working on getting the Flattr button in, as well as a nicer comment count button.

We are also working on a new dashboard for the settings page that should help make turning sharing options on and off a lot more intuitive. I am particularly excited about this dashboard I have to say. It will be drag and drop and should be super slick.

Other than that, we are of course very interested in getting feedback from anyone using it and seeing how we can improve the plugin for them.

How would you recommend Digg Digg is used to maximize the number of shares?

I believe above everything our goal is to help bloggers get more shares and traffic for their blogposts. By emphasizing the floating sharebar, I believe we can help to maximize this, as the opportunity to share is available for the reader at any point.

The setup we have found to work the best to maximize shares is this:

• Add the floating share bar, on the left of posts. This gives readers an option to share your article at any moment whilst browsing the article.

• Add the same number of buttons at the bottom of the article, just before the author box, so there is another call to action to share for readers.

• Add no more than 5-6 sharing buttons, so readers aren’t overwhelmed with the number of sharing options.

Your main business is of course Buffer. Tell us a little bit about that.

Buffer in short is a new way to Tweet and share Facebook posts. Anything you find worth sharing, you can drop into your Buffer queue. From there it will be posted for you at an optimal time, well spaced out over the day.

You can add to your Buffer from any page, with our browser extensions for Chrome, Safari or Firefox. It works super simple, all you do is click “add to Buffer”, like in this example:

The interesting part we found after doing some research with over 1 million Tweets, is that by using Buffer, we can increase the number of clicks on your Tweets by 200%, double the number of retweets and increase your Klout score by an average of 3.5 points.

How can WordPress users benefit from Buffer?

To make Buffering even easier, we have built the Buffer button for blogs.

We have seen some great results of increased sharing of articles with it. The key benefit is that a blogger will get more clicks on the links that are shared through Buffer from his blog. At the same time, there is a chance for readers to browse a blog for longer, and Buffer multiple posts without ever flooding your followers. I just spotted a recent Tweet, that describes this better than I ever could:

@jeffbullas Thank you for offering the @bufferapp capability to post.It makes it easy to schedule all your AWESOME blog writings.

— Arundel Bell (@ArundelBell) February 8, 2012

An interesting result we found is that the Buffer button gets more usage than the Google+ button for any blog we are on. That was an extremely pleasant surprise to us.

Buffer has the beating of Google+

Is there anything else you’d like to share with the WPMU readers?

Thanks a lot for the interview Tom. Yes, WPMU is an absolutely amazing resource for me and I also always learn lots from the great comments on posts from readers. So if there are any questions or suggestions for us from you reading this, I would greatly appreciate to learn about it. This community here is filled with experts and it would be great to get any thoughts on how we can improve Digg Digg.

You Heard The Man!

If you use Digg Digg, now is the perfect opportunity to provide your feedback, just as Leo has requested above. Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Thank you very much to Leo for taking the time to answer my questions! You can download Digg Digg by clicking here.

Tom Ewer on Google+