Social Bookmarking for Business
The term “bookmarking” (strictly referring to your Internet browser) is the act of saving a website address on your computer to refer to later. On the other hand, the term “social bookmarking” is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and “tagging” them with keywords.Â
Because social bookmarks are saved online, users can access them anytime and easily share them with their friends and connections. Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organise, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online.
In order to get started, you would need to register with a social bookmarking site, such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc. (These and other social bookmarking sites will be discussed further in this section.)
Then you can store bookmarks, add tags of your choice or designate bookmarks as public or private. People who visit social bookmarking sites can search for resources using specific keywords, person or popularity and find information that’s been “bookmarked” by others.
How to Use Social Bookmarking for Business
Social bookmarking is a powerful tool that businesses can leverage to make their online content more visible and reach a larger audience. Some of the benefits of social bookmarking are below:
- Increase traffic -Social bookmarking helps drive more visitors to your website or blog as you continue to produce interesting content that readers would want to share.
- Attract search engines -The best impact that social bookmarking can have is it makes your website or blog more popular with search engines.
- Quality inbound links -These links are do-follow links, which means they will help your website or blog achieve good rankings in the search engines.
- Increased branding -Most social bookmarking sites will allow you to create your own profile page on their site where you can list your web pages, post links to your site and publish content.
Create an Account
The first step to getting started is to create an account with social bookmarking sites. For optimal content marketing results, it’s recommended that you use more than one social bookmarking site. Take a look at the Tools and Resources page of this section for details on some popular social bookmarking sites. Different sites have different types of users, so when selecting your sites, make sure the users would be interested in your content.
Download Tools and Buttons to Enable Sharing
You may have seen some websites that have social “sharing” icons allowing visitors to bookmark and share their content. After you create an account, the next step is to download tools and buttons that enable people to share your website and blog content. We will go into more detail on this topic in the “Integrated Online Strategy” section where we will discuss adding social media to your website.
Create Lists and Categories
Now it’s time to start creating lists and categories to store your information. You can create categories for different types of readers or different types of content altogether. This will keep your bookmarks organisedand make it much easier to share information with niche groups.
Start Sharing Your Website and Blog Content
After completing all the above, you’re ready to start bookmarking links on the Internet. Simply go to your website and blog, click on pages that would be interesting to the online audience and start submitting them to the social bookmarking sites (don’t bookmark every single page).
Most social bookmarking websites will have a small pop-out or take you to their website in order provide information about the website you are bookmarking, such as website title, description and keywords. You will likely find that your blog content is more sharable than your website since your blog is always being updated with fresh information.
Start Networking with the Community
Much like other social media technologies, social bookmarking is about interaction. Rather than just bookmarking a bunch of pages on your website and blog, be sure to browse through the social bookmarking site for other articles and resources relevant to your industry. Take a look at what other people have listed with similar topics and keywords and comment on other people’s submissions.
The way to get noticed is to leave smart comments on other posts. Also remember to contact people in the community and add them to your list. Maintaining a steady level of activity on social bookmarking sites makes it easier to develop a presence and connect with users.
Social Bookmarking Best Practices Checklist
Don’t bookmark useless websites.
Refrain from sharing sites that bring no value or provides no use to the general public. Only share sites that users would find beneficial. (Sites that would only be useful to you can be marked as private.)
1. Don’t spam
This ties in with the above point. Don’t bookmark every single page on your website. If you start bookmarking only your content, you could be considered a spammer and users will think of you as someone who is only interested in promoting your business. It’s not a good idea to bookmark only your resources. Branch out and bookmark articles related to your industry that readers would find beneficial.
2 Submit your bookmarks over a span of time.
When you first create your social bookmarking account, the immediate reaction is to bookmark everything on the same day. A better idea is to space your submissions across a schedule (3-4 days a week) until you have bookmarked your most recent content. When you add more posts to your blog, you can bookmark those accordingly. Then as you find other interesting articles online, you can add those to the mix too.
3. Use more than one tag.
The tags you use when submitting a resource is how people will find your links. You have the choice of using one tag or several tags, which will make your links even easier to find. By using more than one tag, your site can be found in more than one way. Some social bookmarking sites use a “tag cloud”, which is a list of different tags with the popular tags in larger bolded font, making it simple for users to find popular bookmarks.
4. Join the right categories.
It would be a shame if the interesting and informative articles that you are bookmarking get missed because you did not choose the right category for them.
5. Provide useful comments.
Commenting on other people’s submissions is a great way to display your expertise, get noticed and build a relationship. One-word comments like “excellent” aren’t sufficient. Make sure the comments you leave are useful to the submitter and other readers.
6. Build relationships.
When you establish relationships with other social bookmarkers, you increase the chances of them reviewing your submissions, liking them and leaving comments.
7. Don’t use an automated software or service.
Promoting your content through social bookmarking takes time. Social bookmarking sites have worked to defeat the use of automated entries with scripting techniques that even sense the time and quality of your submissions.
8. Social Bookmarking Tools and Resources
- StumbleUpon: Users can browse, discover and rate web pages, photos and videos. The site uses like/dislike ratings to form collaborative opinions on submission quality – http://bit.ly/eAuZTf
- StumbleUponOfficial Blog – http://bit.ly/h4iQu0
- StumbleUponAdd-ons – http://bit.ly/grFyVJ
- Delicious: This site has a “hotlist” on its homepage and “popular” and “recent” pages. It has a simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, and RSS feeds – http://bit.ly/h7rnPg
- Delicious Official Blog – http://bit.ly/eP7Sn0
- Delicious Buttons and Add-ons – http://bit.ly/fpFqZZ
- Technorati: This is a search engine for blogs that looks at tags that have been placed on websites. The tags help categorize search results with recent results appearing first – http://bit.ly/9i9i7I
- TechnoratiOfficial Blog – http://bit.ly/hMQeji
- Twittorati (where the blogsphere and twittershere meet) – http://bit.ly/i7iSld
- Blog Engage: This tool allows you to submit your blog articles for review by all participants of the site and can be promoted by its users as well – http://bit.ly/g1jNdD
- Blog Engage Forum
- Blog Engage Social Blog – http://bit.ly/hKoDX0
- Reddit: This is a social news site where users can submit links to news content online. Readers vote for the stories and the most popular links appear higher on the front page – http://bit.ly/e3iMAs
- RedditTools – http://bit.ly/h5sw8K
- RedditOfficial Blog – http://bit.ly/eCBxyu
- Digg: This is another social news website that allows users to vote stories up or down (called digging or burying) – http://bit.ly/fSi3fI
- DiggOfficial Blog – http://bit.ly/fbt2M0
- DiggFAQs – http://bit.ly/f7ZrEt
- Diigo: This site allows users to bookmark and tag web pages as well highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page – http://bit.ly/iduKv1
- DiigoProduct Tour – http://bit.ly/eOcuZe
- DiggoTool Bar – http://bit.ly/fodtnD
- Squidoo: This community user-generated website allows users to create pages (lenses) for subjects of interest, which uses the concept of lenses as its primary feature – http://bit.ly/iblHhF
- SquidooOfficial Blog – http://bit.ly/fCL3C8
- SquidooTools, Resources and Guides – http://bit.ly/gU6zCR
- Sphinn: This is a place for interactive and Internet marketers to share news stories, participate in subject-specific discussions, build a network and stay up-to-date – http://bit.ly/eAjKKO
- SphinnOfficial Blog – http://bit.ly/fLHU8n
- SphinnTools, Widgets and Plug-ins – http://bit.ly/eRWeq0
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