Although social bookmarking has been around for several years, it is finally beginning to gain in popularity because it is a powerful way to organize and share information.
Today, in addition, it is fast emerging as an effective marketing, public relations, and promotional resource to reach large groups or customer bases. The reason for this is because at its best social bookmarking is very effective at identifying and drawing together communities of persons or companies with related needs and interests.
Put another way, instead of reaching 2000 people with a passing interest in what you do, social bookmarking will help you reach 200 with a genuine interest in what you do.
Simpler still, social bookmarking is the digital version of word-of-mouth marketing, which will never go out of fashion.
Who’s using social bookmarking?
Those using social bookmarking include anyone who wants to share a list or lists of helpful web sites with others using the net. This might be an individual who wants to share their passion or hobby, by listing the top ten sites or articles on their subject; through to a business providing a list of hot resources which support their product or service; or, an expert in their field compiling a list of sites and articles, which summarize their research or area of expertise.
How does social bookmarking work?
The way social bookmarking works is by allowing Internet users to save their favorite web sites, online articles, social media groups, or any url address that holds value and interest to them.
Those that want to share the information and the sites they have worked so hard at finding, make their bookmarked lists available to others through one or more of the many social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Furl, StumbleUpon, or Delicious.
Visitors to these sites can look up lists according to category and then review the sites listed. They can also search using user created tags, keywords (see below), persons, or popularity.
How to use social bookmarking in practice
Social bookmarking has created a concept known as Folksonomy or social tagging. Folksonomy is a process where Internet users add metadata, tags, and keywords to describe web sites and urls that they want to make public.
When a person finds a site or a list of sites, they submit the site to one of the social bookmarking sites listed above. At the same time, when they submit the URLs, they also assign tags to classify the site so that others can find it more easily.
When users want to find a list of relevant sites, they can go to one of the social bookmarking sites and enter in keywords to search for lists or they can search for specific tags assigned to site lists.
This process can be very powerful because it allows users to define in their own terms the information and resources that have been helpful to them. Often, the keywords chosen are more real-world and business related, and so search results can be considered to represent a more authentic snap shot of the subject you are searching for.
Social bookmarking for business promotion
For businesses, the upside of social bookmarking is that it can empower your customers to create an online community, of which you are a part, and independent of your marketing activity. In marketing, impartial recommendations like these are worth many times more than those you pay for.
In addition you can use social bookmarking sites yourself to search your competitors, and or potential associates or people you might be able to link with. So, for example, those working in real estate can go to del.icio.us and search lists of urls that are focused on commercial or residential real estate.
Adding social bookmarking links
To help users mark a company’s site or blog for sharing and saving, it will be advantageous to add social bookmark links to the company’s site or blog.
This way as users land on the site or blog, they can click on the social bookmark link and add it to a list. Add This, and Share This both provide website owners with a simple free plugin (HTML code to cut and paste) which provides a website button including hundreds of social media and social bookmarking sites.
Companies can also contract with social bookmarking services that can help get a url posted on the social bookmarking sites. These services specialize in reviewing web sites for social bookmarking potential and submitting the url to the hundreds of bookmarking sites for you.
Promotional benefits of social bookmarking
The promotional benefits of social bookmarking are many, but the main benefit, and the reason why businesses ignore it at their peril, is that social bookmarking provides a powerful addition to your SEO campaign. This is because of the way it links sites to keywords created by end users, which as suggested above, are more likely to be the same words people use on the search engines.
In short, adding a company’s web site to social bookmarking lists will generate more site traffic. Indeed, within days of adding a company’s site to social bookmarking sites, the URL starts showing up in search engine results lists.
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