The latest stats from StatCounter show that StumbleUpon’s recent jump to the top spot for referring social media traffic in the US was not a blip. In July when they passed Facebook they hit 43% with Facebook coming in at 38%. Now, a scant month later, Stumble has edged up to 50% while Facebook gained just 1% to finish at 39%.

This is only in the US – globally Facebook still trumps all other sites by a large margin

If you are practicing PR in the US, and you’re including social media to extend the reach of your news content, you should reach to the 15 million loyal SU users in the US, enggement them and nurture those relationships.

Here’s how:

1. If you have not yet done so, create an account and set up a profile
2. Link to your SU profile in your About page or in your press contact listing
3. Add the StumbleUpon button to all your news pages (instructions here )
4. Start to build your network on SU, just as you do in any other social site
5. Get to know the members of the community
6. See who Stumbles the kind of content you have in your news releases, articles and videos
7. Stumble their content – it is not considered good form to Stumble your own content
8. Use the SU ads feature to promote your release headlines – it costs just 5c per impression and more than 60 000 brands have already used this paid discovery option
9. SU recently added a search feature to their site so it is more important than ever to have your news content indexed there

What makes this search function different is users are searching by interest, introducing thousands of new interests and millions of new websites.

As with any other social site StumbleUpon is not a quick fix. There is no one-shot way to tap into this traffic. You have to do the work and become a genuine member of the community. But at leastyou are investing time in the #1 social referrer.

If you have not used Stumble Upon before it will obviously not show up as a referrer to your website. Give it try – wouldn’t you rather spend time on a site that has the potential to send you 50% of your social traffic?

Caveat: do not drop out any currently successful actions. Keep doing what you are doing and add Stumble Upon to the mix.

Check out The Proactive Report for more articles by Sally Falkow