Turn Your Social Bookmark Bar Into a Powerful Marketing Tool

Some people bookmark their favorites in order to share exciting posts to their friends. For marketers, social bookmarks are marketing weapons they can use to gain advantage over their competitors. While there are numerous marketing tools at your disposal, social bookmarks are among the powerful weapons that can tremendously boost your marketing campaign.

There are many social bookmarks today, but only a few stands out from the rest. To gain better traction, it is highly recommended to concentrate your social bookmarking activities not only to popular networks but also to social bookmarks with high Google PageRank. Three of the best bookmarks to start with are as follows.

Top 3 Social Bookmark Tool Bars You Should Install

StumbleUpon Tool Bar

StumbleUpon enjoys a high Google PageRank of 8, and currently there are more than 25 million members using the site, thereby making the network quite attractive for backlinking.  You will not only get valuable link juice for your SEO but you will also obtain direct referral to your webpages.

StumbleUpon has a previous history of getting high referrals surpassing all other social networks back in the early months of 2011. Today, the network still gives high monthly page referral averaging 1 billion per month. Getting even a minute share of the page referral is already enough to boost any campaign.

That is why integrating StumbleUpon marketing into your social mix is highly recommended in order to enjoy the benefits for your business. You will be more efficient in your marketing if you install the StumbleUpon social bookmark bar in your browser. This will make it easier on your part to bookmark your interests.

Reddit Bookmarks

Just like StumbleUpon marketing, there are many reasons to start doing Reddit marketing. In 2012, Reddit reported in its year-end report that the site has served an astounding 37 billion pageviews; there were also more than 400 million unique users on that year. The network further claimed to have added 30 million posts and 250 million comments.

For the month of December 2012, the average page view is 3 billion, up 50% year-over-year. The significant improvement in various aspects is reflective of the rising popularity of Reddit. This makes Reddit a social bookmarking network to watch for.

While marketing using Reddit can help obtain direct referral, direct marketing at the site is highly discouraged. Majority of the members are not comfortable being marketed to, and many of them will quickly ignore or even suspend members doing aggressive marketing. Remember, this is a social network; so you must socially engage with the other members and not advertise to them.

An effective technique is to use indirect marketing. This means, don’t just bookmark and share your own contents. Rather, bookmark the contents of other users, as well. A good bookmarking strategy is to observe the 90-10 rule. Your bookmarks should consist of 90% posts of other members while the remaining 10% are yours. This worked well in many cases. But of course you can split-test to find out what works best at our end. The main point is to include Reddit in your bookmarking strategy to achieve better milestone from your campaign.

 

Delicious Bookmarking Tool

Delicious has a Google PageRank of 8, thus the network can give your bookmarks valuable SEO link juices. On top of that, you will also get direct referrals from the network.

Social Bookmarking Tips

Social bookmarking is a unique form of social networking. The main focus of engagement is content. Unique contents will quickly go viral. Unlike the other social networks like Twitter and Facebook that require massive amount of fans in order for your shared files to spread like raging wildfire, in this case you don’t necessarily need to have a lot of followers. Your bookmarked contents will go viral quick as long as they are truly interesting and awe-inspiring.

Therefore, your bookmarking strategy must be totally different from your Facebook marketing plan and Twitter marketing techniques. To be effective in bookmarking, here are a couple of quick tips to boost your campaign.

Submit Posts with Eye-Popping Headlines

Remember, bookmarked contents will be generally shown in the news feed along with the bookmarks of others. Thus, your bookmarks will be competing with those shared by the other members. Those with attention-grabbing headlines will get a bigger share of the pageview pie. To attain higher click-through-rate, make your headline standout from the rest. Keep in mind that the headline can partly make or break your social media success.

Aside from the headline, your content must also be unique. Just like in other online marketing campaigns, content is king. Thus, focus your social bookmarking on quality and share your bookmarks with the readers in mind, and not the search engines.

Add Variations to your Bookmarks

Take note that there are various types of contents that you can bookmark such as articles, photos, videos, and infographics. Don’t focus your bookmarks only on one type of content. Instead, add variations to your bookmarks by sharing different types of files.

Many marketers are focusing solely on web contents. As a result, only a few attained better milestones in their marketing. Avoid such mistake by regularly sharing blog posts mixed with images, videos, and infographics, in between posts or within the articles.

Visuals can effectively spark social engagements among the readers, particularly social likes, shares, and comments. These social signals will further add more mileage not only to your social media activities but also to your search engine optimization.

While your bookmarks can go viral even with few followers to your profile, it is best to have plenty of fans. They will be first-hand to see your new bookmarks, thereby boosting the page views of your shared interests. Being a social network, you must also engage with your followers and with the other members of the network. This can help you in establishing credibility, and your reputation in varied communities will be enhanced as well.

In a nutshell, social bookmarking is an effective marketing strategy. While this is not as popular as social media marketing with Facebook and Twitter, your marketing mileage will be further stretched-out if you include this strategy in your marketing mix.