Posts Tagged ‘social bookmarking’
Social bookmarking is the process of storing, organizing, searching, and managing bookmarks of web pages that you want to remember or share with your social network. Effective social bookmarking sites include StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious.
Why Social Bookmarking?
You absolutely need to use social bookmarking sites when you publish new content, whether that’s new web pages, blog posts, or news and press articles. Social bookmarking works because it will drive large amount of traffic to your website.
Social bookmarking communities view bookmarks either chronologically, by tags, or by search engines. When you bookmark a page on your website and share it with an online community, it classifies that page as useful within the particular category you specified. The bookmark is then disseminated and shared among a viral community.
Social bookmarking is the third most effective medium of searching and finding useful information, preceded only by Google searches and directly visiting websites. It is a powerful marketing tool you should use to promote the information on your website and drive an amount of traffic almost equitable to what you get from Google searches.
How to use social bookmarking effectively
Rich Brooks of Social Media Examiner wrote in a recent blog post:
“It’s always best when someone else bookmarks your content, so it might makes sense to have a small ‘bookmarking club’ with friends where you promote each other’s work. This ‘seeding’ will often encourage others to bookmark your content.”
His advice is very useful in that bookmarking your own content will work in terms of search rankings, but it may end up looking like just promotional efforts in the eyes of your consumers.
When you publish new content (i.e. new web pages or blog posts), make sure you bold your keywords, add related links back to your website, and use tags to categorize your information to make searches more effective. Then, bookmark your site on a few different social bookmarking channels like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious.
In a day or two, review your web analytics and see exactly where your traffic came from. You’ll be surprised to see how quickly social bookmarking can work for you.
Social bookmarking is becoming more and more useful as consumers turn to the web to find information on products and services. It is the process of saving web pages to a public web site and tagging them with keywords.
Any visitor can search for their topic of interest at a bookmarking website using keywords, names of people, popularity ratings, and so on.
According to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Report, social bookmarking is the number one social media tool marketers want to know more about. A reported 61% of marketers wanted to learn more about sites like del.icio.us and how they can be used to help reach their audiences.
Small business owners and B2B marketers were more interested in social bookmarking tools than others surveyed, according to the report.
Why does it work?
Social bookmarking is an easy way to aggregate and categorize resourceful information. It is also extremely effective for disseminating information about your product or service to your consumer audience.
Because the person who bookmarks the page has the authority to tag it with specific keywords, anyone who searches for those keywords will be exposed to that page. This is especially effective when distributing blog posts out to the web.
Also, once a person sees a bookmark, he or she has access to seeing the other bookmarked resources tagged by the person who created it. This allows for social connections, online conversation, word of mouth marketing, and the quick and easy dissemination of information.
Why should you use it?
If you are a small business owner it is important for you to at least experiment with social bookmarking because it is absolutely rising as a trend. Social bookmarking is an activity that allows consumers to express different, personalized perspectives on the information they are exposed to.
Consumers make social connections based on common interests. If your topic of interest is sailing, for example, you may read a bookmark tagged about sailing. You may find that the person who tagged that bookmark also bookmarked a page about boat repairs. This can take you into a completely new and potentially profitable direction.
The possibilities are endless.
Vesta Digital Blog 