Many online bookmark
management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms
"social bookmarking" and "tagging".
Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, allowing users
to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.
These bookmarks are usually public, and 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.
Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their
bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based
system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a
combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated
with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have
bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the
relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.
Many social bookmarking services 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 by networking with other social book markers and collaborating with
each other.
For the
past 10 years, social bookmarking has been a way for Internet users to add,
edit, annotate and share bookmarks of documents on the web. There have been a
lot of bookmarking services around since 1996, but it wasn’t until Delicious.
It is the first social bookmarking site, popularized the term known as tagging and social bookmarking.
Have you ever emailed a friend or family member and
sent them a link to a website you thought they might find interesting? If so,
you have participated in social bookmarking.
But what is social bookmarking, anyway? After
all, it's not like you can take a small piece of cardboard or a sticky note and
physically put it on a web page the way you can do with the pages in a real
book. And even if you know how to use the bookmarks tool that comes built in
with every major web browser, this still isn't "social" bookmarking.
You can think of social bookmarking like this:
simply tagging a web page
with a web-based tool so you can easily access it later. Instead of saving them
to your web browser, you are saving them to the web. And, because your bookmarks
are online, you can easily access them anywhere you have an internet connection
and share them with friends.
Just a Short History
Shared
online bookmarks began, in a very early form, in 1996. In 1997, WebTagger came
along with more advanced social bookmarking features. The service continued to
evolve for the next several years and in 2003, Delicious came along and
pioneered tagging, while also creating the term social bookmarking. In 2004,
Delicious began to take off. In 2004, Flickr came along, inspired by tagging on
Delicious. Bookmarking continued to evolve with various websites that have
taken the Internet by storm and changed the concept of how people use the
Internet. These are sites like Digg, which launched in 2004, Reddit in 2005 and Newsvine in
2006. Today, both Reddit and Digg rank in the top 300 most visited sites on the
Internet today.
Why Social Bookmarking is Important
New social
bookmarking tools have sprung up allowing users to bookmark content, share
it across their networks, and get recommendations about new content they might
like. But it’s not only users that benefit. There are ways your business can
leverage social bookmarking for sales and building a strong community of brand
ambassadors.
How?
Let’s take a look at three benefits of social bookmarking for businesses today:
Social Bookmarking Sites Drive Targeted Traffic
Social bookmarking sites allow you to categorize the content you save with custom keywords (or tags). Unlike in SEO, these keywords aren’t ranked by percentage of relevance. This allows you to make your bookmarks more searchable and easier to find by a broader base. With the right tags, you’ll build a group of followers who are interested and engaged in the niche of your brand and are likely to bookmark your content themselves.
You’ll also see an increase in repeat traffic that’s vital for
continued engagement. Not every first-time visitor to your site converts to a
sale. But if you offer bookmarking options on your landing page, they’ll be
more likely to remember you down the line when they’re looking to make a
purchase.
The Benefits of Going Viral
Social bookmarking can play a huge role in helping your content go viral.
Because the sites make it easy for users to vote, rate, and share content, your
brand will benefit from increased exposure and social proof. In addition, the
most popular content might get republished on external websites and blogs,
giving you valuable back-links and industry exposure.
Social Bookmarking Helps Build Your Brand
Most social bookmarking sites allow you to create a public profile to display
your content. Not only are these profiles indexed by search engines (hello,
SEO!), but they also make your brand more visible to users. By posting valuable
information and fresh content regularly, you’ll build a name for your brand,
grow your network of fans, and generate huge spikes of traffic back to your
landing page.
Understanding social bookmarking can give a huge boost to the
community surrounding your brand. By making it easier for visitors to bookmark
your content, you’ll see not only more traffic, but more sharing as well. And
as we all know, the more your brand is shared between friends, the more sales
you’ll make down the line.
Why Should Start Social Bookmarking?
Not only can you save your favorite websites and
send them to your friends, but you can also look at what other people have
found interesting enough to tag. Most social bookmarking sites allow
you to browse through the items based on most popular, recently added, or
belonging to a certain category like shopping, technology, politics, blogging,
news, sports, etc. You can even search through what people have
bookmarked by typing in what you are looking for in the search tool.
In fact, social bookmarking sites are being used as intelligent
search engines.Since social bookmarking tools are access on the
web or via a web-based application, this means you can save a new bookmark
using one device, access your account on another device and see everything you
added or updated from your other device. As long as you're signed into your
social bookmarking account, you'll have the most recently updated version of
all your bookmarks and other customizable information.
A few popular social bookmarking tools include:
Evernote
A few popular social bookmarking tools include:
Evernote
Benefit From Social Bookmarking
- Social bookmarking and social news allow you to specifically target what you want to see. Instead of going into a search engine, typing something into the search field and then searching for that needle in a haystack, you can quickly narrow down the items to what you are looking for.
- Because many social bookmarking sites display recently added lists and popular links, you can both keep up with what's current and see relevant information. For example, let's say you are interested in learning more about social shopping. You might search for social shopping on one of these sites and come up with two articles: one with a hundred votes and one with two votes.
- It's pretty easy to tell that the article with a hundred votes might be your best choice. And this is a lot easier than typing "social shopping" into a search engine and seeing page after page after page of links that may or may not be useful based on what you're looking for.
- So, what started out as a way to send bookmarks to friends has really grown into social search engines. You no longer need to page through thousands of results to find something that real humans would recommend enough to save for themselves and share with others. Now, you can simply go to a social bookmarking site, choose the category or tag that matches your interest, and find the most popular websites.
Key Features of Social Bookmarking
There are at least three main features that I conceive as being
the most important when thinking about social bookmarking:
Tagging (classifying)
- Probably the most key feature for social
bookmarking
- Refers to the user's ability to provide a
quick label (and multiple quick labels) to any resource she has bookmarked
- Tags congregate into tag clouds, which allow
all users to see which tags are popular ones for a user or for a
particular group of users
- Terms that tagging invokes: folksonomy (grass-roots classification schemes as opposed to top-down, controlled vocabulary) and information technologies (ability to collect data produces new data--aggregation of tags teaches us something new: how people think about resources)
Pivoting (searching)
- Most social bookmarking sites work in a very
similar fashion in that they allow people explore bookmarked resources in
multiple ways
- If I were interested in what Kristin has
bookmarked, and I can click on "kpartlo" and see what she has
tagged
- If I'm interested in what people have tagged
as "crime," I can search by that tag
- If I'm interested in what Kristin has tagged
as "crime," I can do that, too
- If I find a resource that I like, I can see who else has tagged that resource, identify a user who has similar resources as my own, and see what else he has tagged
Widgets (exporting)
- Increasing, most social bookmarking sites
allow you to create a "widget," essentially a little tool that allows
you or someone else export my tags to other sites and media
- For example, I could allow my tag cloud to
appear in the sidebar to my blog
- For example, someone interested in what I am tagging could subscribe to an RSS feed that tells him when I tag a new resource
Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking
Social
bookmarking introduces a couple disadvantages to SEO. Social bookmarks
seemingly take the authenticity away from organically earning links. SEOs
and content marketers become robots executing a strategy of plug-n-play when we
should be empowered to solve problems with our content.
You may not
need social bookmarking in your SEO strategy. At SEJ, we don’t have a
dedicated social bookmarking strategy anymore. Instead, the goal is for our
content to earn their own links. Ultimately, some posts may not scale, but we
love seeing how our content gets distributed naturally.
When
there is no need to dedicate time to share posts on social bookmarking
sites, a magical thing happens. You let your content do the work. The “chores”
of manually posting links are no longer a burden and you can focus your
attention on higher priority items like manually outreaching to people you
mentioned in your articles.
Some will
argue that you’re not getting the right traffic from social bookmarking sites.
Submitting a link to a social bookmarking site may increase traffic, but may
reduce your engagement metrics (time on site, conversions, page views, etc.)
and increase your bounce rate. If one article can produce X traffic from
one social bookmarking site, why can’t you produce the equal or more traffic
from a social channel? Or, syndicating your content? The reality is that it’s a
lot more work.
Developing
and managing communities in multiple channels, creating authentic content, and
manually performing personalized outreach takes time. It also increases the
amount of work on the shoulders of each person doing the work. In order for
links to build quickly, SEOs must collaborate with the content team.
Ownership of links is now distributed and no longer a plug-n-play tactic.
Another major issue plaguing social
bookmarking sites is a little algorithm called Penguin. The more low-quality, non-relevant
links you generate, the more red flags you’ll be waving for Penguin to come
waddling in. Search engines already have it out for social
bookmarking sites. Just take a look at what Google search results brings up
when you type in “social bookmarking sites:”
Dynamic Strategy of Social Bookmarking
So you’ve
heard both sides of the story of social bookmarking. Now, you’re trying to
decide what’s best for you. Follow these steps for a real, actionable
social bookmarking strategy.
1. Know your Audience
Fact is,
unless you know who and where your audience is, you probably won’t know what
social bookmarking channels they are on. Developing personas from your Google
Analytics and social channels will help guide you to determine where to spend
your time. For example, if you’re writing a blog on parenting tips, sharing an
article on Inbound.org is not going to be useful to you or the audience.
2. Engage in Conversation
It’s always
scary to start a conversation for the first time. But, asking questions,
leaving comments, and recommending another person submission, even if you don’t
know them personally creates a community of engagement. This technique works
because people love sharing if your content makes the right connection.
3. Say ‘Thank You’ to Others
Before you
begin posting, the temptation to only submit your own content may be high.
Resist the urge. Just take some time to share and promote others work. It’s a
way to say thank you to others.
4. Casually Self-Promote
Finally, when you think you’ve nailed it on
a great piece, pick your social bookmarking site to share. You should
have your personas built out for each social bookmarking site you’re
building your community on so you’ll know which piece will perform best where.
For instance, my article on Google Adwords probably
won’t hit the top of the charts on Pinterest. Be selective. Be courtesy to your
audience on each social bookmarking site.
Social bookmarking or link
building is now link earning. And, link earning is no longer about link
chasing. So, do you develop a social bookmarking strategy? Or, do look grow
your community elsewhere? I’d love to know more about the tools, channels,
and strategies you use for social bookmarking.
