Social bookmarking is in the inner circle of every business’s ‘social media marketing’ strategy today and is as important and value adding as the other forms of promotions like blogging , micro blogging , social networking and media sharing. When it come Social Bookmarking , (just like any other thing) there are a lot of handy information available and hidden around the web from your eyeballs. My aim here is to bring all those valuable information in to one single reference guide so that you don’t have to end up looking at 1000 places before getting your hands on to that small piece of information that may help you and your business today.
Introduction to Social Bookmarking
At the root level, a social bookmarking service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. ‘Social Tagging‘ is one of the significant features of all social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways that never been possible before and develop shared vocabularies known as ‘folksonomies’. These bookmarks are usually public in nature, though can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Generally most of the social bookmarking services also provide ‘web feeds’ for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. It also helps to promote your sites and business’s by networking with other social book markers and collaborating with each other. As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social networking features.
Source: Wikipedia
A Short History of Social Bookmarking
Lets have a look at the brief history (or the major milestones from the history) of this concept called social book marking before moving further to find out more.
- 1996 – Concept of Shared Online Bookmarking kicks off with the Launch of ’itList’.
- 1996 to 1999 – Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others enters the market.
- 2000 – The dot com bubble burst , literally washing of all the above mentioned book marking sites.
- 2003 – Rebirth and Re branding of online book marking as Social Bookmarking by Delicious ( del.icio.us ).
- 2004 to 2005 – Digg and Reddit enters the scene.
- 2005 to 2011 – Golden Era of Social Bookmarking websites.
- 2012 – 2013 – Social Bookmarking websites starting to loose steam?
Here are some articles from around the internet which may satisfy the historian in you.
Extras – itList and Other Bookmark Managers : This article published in the year 2000 reviews itList and also talks briefly about the other bookmarking managers which was popular at that time.
Blink’s Portable Bookmarks : This article from NYTimes talks about the ‘new’ web service offered by blink for the web users. Obviously back in 1999 it was really a new concept.
How Social Bookmarking Can Help Your Business
Though slowly fading away, social bookmarking websites still has immense potential when it come to marketing and promotion for any kind of business’s , products or services. So how can it benefit you? find below a few of the reasons.
Boost Branding
Right kind of branding is a vital component for the success of your business and just like social networking sites, social bookmarking sites are an ideal place for you to start your branding and get more exposure and boost for your brand.
Faster Search Engine Indexing
It’s a known fact that search bots like crowded corners of the web (read it as websites with lot of traffic) and get back there very often to check out the latest happenings around.So what this means to you? If you want some of your content or a new website to be indexed faster by all the search engines, all you have to do is publish it on social bookmarking sites rather than waiting and praying.
Link Building
Though I’m not much sure about the importance that search engines like Google provides for the kind of links you get from social bookmarking sites, still there is nothing wrong in getting a few easy links while you promote your brand at the same time.
Quick Traffic Building
So you have just finished the work on that epic post , and now you want to to get some attention from the world and looking for options for that? Look no further, Social bookmarking sites are your ideal platform to generate that kind of buzz and get immediate traffic which can sometime bring down your web server.
List of Social Bookmarking Websites
There are 1000′s of social bookmarking sites out there waiting for you to plant your links and promote your brands.Unfortunately not every one of them may not bring the right results in terms of traffic , link quality and data visibility and the experts always recommends that it’s better to focus your promotion on a few of the best social bookmarking sites around.Also note that most of the major social networks like Twitter and Facebook supports social bookmarking. Find below some of the most popular one’s at the moment for you to kick start your link building exercise.
If you are too aggressive and greedy and not satisfied with the above list , here is a better list of 100 plus social bookmarking sites .
Social Bookmarking Etiquette and Tips
It’s really difficult to predict what kind of content will go viral and get accepted in social bookmarking sites, as this changes from site to site and the kind of audience for each of it.But following a few of the below guidelines (I should rather write Etiquette) will at-least make sure that you and your brand is getting the right kind of exposure and acceptance.
Post Your Best Content
Please post only the best content from your blog in these kind of sites.Almost all the major social bookmarking sites around now have human editors who quality check your content before allowing it to go live.
Choose The Right Categories
Most social bookmarking sites will have various categories under which you can post your links.Don’t hurry up and post your links in the first category you come across. Have a look around and find that category which is really relevant to the kind of content you are submitting.
Don’t Spam
Yes ,Social bookmarking is indeed an easy way to gain some backlinks , exposure and traffic in a very short time. But make sure that you are using it only as one of the means to gain backlinks rather than abusing it by posting anything and everything on it.End of the day you are responsible for your brand and a ‘Spammer’ image wont do anything good for you and your brand.
Social Bookmarking Tools
There are obviously 3 ways you can run your ‘Social Bookmarking Campaign’ .Run it as a completely ‘manual‘ where you will find the relevant bookmarking sites for your business and submit the bookmarks manually one by one.Run it as ‘Semi Automated‘ where you will still decide up on the kind of bookmarking sites you should use, but add the links using a social bookmarking tool.The third method is where you can just move this entire activity on to ‘autopilot‘ mode where the tool will take care of finding and submitting activities all by it self.
It will be advisable to run a ‘semi automated campaign’ as that gave you more control on where you wanna submit your links in and also saves a lot of your valuable time which you can use for great content creation. Find below few of the premium tools and websites that may come handy for you.
WooHoo..
So you have read till here..fantastic .. Hats off to you.
Now, here’s the deal. I took a lot of effort to make this comprehensive guide for you, and I want to keep it that way.
If you have come across some valuable information , article , tip or tool that should have been part of this Social Bookmarking Guide or is there is an entire section which we need to add to this to make it perfect..Please share a comment and let me know. Of course , that doesn’t means that you can spam my comment section..I hate spam as much as you do..
Thank you so much! Having spent more than 8 hours putting this together, this is one of those posts I will legitimately ask you to share. Please, those buttons at the bottom look really attractive..and I know you really wanna click it.. 
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