This is a Guest Post by Gunter Jameson who writes about several topics including travel, minimalism and online classes.

Social Plugins are awesome. No doubt they are some of the best things you can put on your blog. They allow visitors to your site the ability to quickly and easily share your blog on individual posts on Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, and more at the simple click of a button.

In fact, there are so many platforms and places to share your content nowadays that your site could easily get jumbled up with all the individual social plugins you could post on your site for every possible social networking and sharing site.

So you should concentrate on the important ones and—spoiler alert—Digg is not one of them.

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Blog Popularity Contests

In the early days of blogging, when everyone was trying to find cool blogs to read, a bunch of services sprouted up purporting to give average Joes, like you and me, a handle on what blogs were the most popular.

Services like Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and more let users find blogs they thought were cool or interesting and share them with their friends through these services.

These blog popularity sites would then tally the number of times the story or blog was shared and keep a running count, effectively giving users a popularity score for individual blogs.

Back when most people were trying to figure out what a blog was, these were great services. But they are becoming less and less relevant.

Getting Eyes on Your Site

Putting a Digg button on your site let’s readers easily click to share your site on Digg. The theory goes that the more Digg hits you get, the more exposure your blog will get to other people who follow Digg. Although this is true in theory, it doesn’t work in reality.

Because Digg became so ubiquitous, in the mid-to-late 2000s, Digg buttons were everywhere, even on already popular news and information sites. Inevitably, sites that have the most traffic, get the most love from Digg—pushing your little blog all the way to the bottom of the pile.

In essence, the popular sites on the internet at large are also the most popular sites on Digg, pushing out all the smaller sites, and rendering the service basically useless.

Worth Reading:

Even if, by chance, you are selected randomly to be featured on the Digg front page (as it were), you may get a lot of hits to your site, but chances are those people will not be returning anytime soon.

Remember, they’re not looking for your site, they’re just looking for any site. And if they’re looking for any site, then chances are they don’t know what they are looking for and are unlikely to stay on any one blog for too long.

To Digg ?

Of course, there is no harm in putting a Digg button on your site. Finding and installing the free WordPress plugin certainly won’t hurt your site. You can even click your own Digg button once and get it noticed by Digg. But don’t count on your Digg button channeling large amounts of people to your blog everyday.

In today’s social media marketing world, we can no longer market to the masses—it wastes times and energy for very little return. Instead, as you blog, concentrate more on targeting the audience of your specific blog with better social media tools and strategies.

Do you look out for a blogs Digg/Reddit popularity when determining it’s Popularity ? Share your views with us in the form of Comments.