What is Social Bookmarking?
How to Use Social Bookmarking in Your 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. 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. 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 in Your Business
Social bookmarking is a powerful tool that businesses can leverage to make their online content more visible and reach a larger readership. 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 organised and 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.
TIP: Don’t just bookmark your company’s content. Eventually you will be considered a spammer who is only interested in promoting your business if all you’re sharing is your own content.
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.
