Founded by former General Manager of Yahoo News Chris McGill and publicly launched last October, social network Mixx has since then increased its web presence at an impressive rate. According to Alexa, the daily reach of Mixx has increase by 561% in the last 3 months and is now even comparable to the popular StumbleUpon, which was founded in 2001 and acquired by eBay in 2007. Not too bad of a start!

Mixx’s partnership with CNN certainly helped the social network along the way but it wouldn’t have been possible without a solid foundation. In a nutshell, Mixx is similar to competitor Digg while focusing more on community building which as a social media marketing professional, I really find appealing. For example, Mixx offers the option to join groups of people with similar interests. If you can’t find what you are looking for, a new feature allowing you to create your own group with its own sub-domain has been introduced last June. What I find really cool about Mixx is that when comes time to publish an article, you can select in which group you want your article to appear. As a result, your article can end up in multiple groups that are looking for that kind of content and in my case, it translates into more traffic than any other social network of its kind at equal time investment.

What I find strange is that Google Insights doesn’t seem to see things the same way when comparing popular social networks such as Ning, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Propeller and Technorati. As top searches related to Mixx, Google Insights is listing terms such as “the mixx”, “mix fm”, etc. You get the idea…I’ve done some testing using Google Trends data in order to optimize geographic targeting of PPC campaigns before and Insights doesn’t seem to be much more reliable.