What Is A Social Bookmark Service And What Good Can It Do for You?
Social media allows more and more people to interact with one another in the online environment on different levels. A social bookmark service allows its users to bookmark web pages that are of interest to them, while having the possibility to make such actions visible on a public level or to certain networks, groups or individuals of choice.
Sharing bookmarks in this way allows people to interact around them: they can vote each other’s bookmarks, get inspired by them, further share them, make comments and add tags collectively. Each social bookmark service offers its own set of options and can revolve around only certain types of items, for example just around pictures or videos.
What are some social bookmark services?
One popular interactive social news website is Digg. Here, visitors can vote in favor or against various web content, actions known as digging and burying. Anyone can submit a site (Digg) and anyone can add a comment to that submitted Digg. Technology-related posts appear to be in focus on Digg. According to social bookmarking website statistics, Digg had a Google page rank 8 in 2011, with 27,500,000 unique monthly visitors.
Reddit is a social bookmark service where logged on users can post content under the form of a link or a text. Other users have the possibility to vote these posts up and down. It can be said that the shared bookmarks get involved in a popularity contest. Reddit had 15,500,000 estimated unique monthly visitors, according to figures from 2011.
StumbleUpon is in a way a web search engine, as it can find and recommend content from the Internet. It basically is a network of Web searchers who end up finding interesting content that they consider worth sharing. The things one browses through there can be bookmarked and other personal bookmarks shared. Users are shown web content that is personalized according to their tastes.
Newsvine is a social news platform. It draws news content from the members of the community and also from mainstream sources, like The Associated Press. Its users can write their own articles, share links that they find interesting and discuss news posted by other users and by professional journalists. Placement of stories is influenced by factors such as how fresh an item is, popularity, and reputation.
Diigo is another social bookmarking Web tool and it allows users to save bookmarked pages, add sticky notes with comments on those websites, highlight areas of particular interest, collect screenshots and other options are also available.
What good can a social bookmark service do?
• Well, as you have noticed from the few described services, a social bookmark service can first of all help you mark web content that you think you will be interested in later on and allows you to access that bookmark from anywhere, since it is not just a browser-saved item. The bookmarks you have made can be shared and commented on with others. You may find inspiring things among others’ bookmarks and others can find brilliant stuff among your posts. Most of all, you can find items fitting exactly your interests: news, pictures, information from preferred categories, such as sports, technology, art, politics and others.
• A social bookmarking service can be used to get more traffic to your website. Social media marketing strategies are important among the SEO efforts to attract more visitors on a website. Social bookmarking helps websites to easily get backlinks. It is true though that even if these backlinks are dofollow links, they may not raise rankings on their own, since the link juice they pass varies as the position of the post changes when fresh items are posted by others. Maybe it’s not link building that should be started using bookmarking sites, but there are definitely important SEO benefits from using social media.
Once posted on social media websites, it is easier to get people to check out your website content, and they can also further share it and also discuss it, thus the content gaining popularity. Search engines have also started to take social activity around different websites into account when ranking these websites. Social signals are thus good for SEO, as are for public relations.
Not only sharing your own website content is important for your marketing campaign. What you share from others, in the same business as you or not, also tells people something about you. You can use this to your advantage to grow your popularity and make new connections.
Aside from posting and bookmarking to grow the visibility of your website on social media, you should also add social sharing buttons to each content page of the website. As visitors can more easily share the content of your site, the site can, of course, receive more social coverage.
