Social Bookmarking Best Practices Checklist
- Don’t bookmark useless websites. with social bookmarking, 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Build relationships. When you establish relationships with other social bookmarkers, you increase the chances of them reviewing your submissions, liking them and leaving comments.
- Don’t use 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.