Making the Most of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has been around for a while now, but not everyone understands how to make the most of it. Here’s an overview as well as some tips on how to use it effectively for business.

What is social bookmarking?

Most people are used to bookmarking web pages on their browser to refer to later; social bookmarking takes this a step further by allowing you to save these pages to a public website. This means that not only can you access them from any computer, but you can also share them with your friends and connections. It’s a useful way to organise, store and manage your bookmarks and a great way to share yours and find other people’s bookmarks of resources online.

Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites are Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many more.  Others who visit the social bookmarking sites can then search for information that has already been bookmarked by entering keywords, specific people or even popularity.

Using social bookmarking in your business

As well as helping you organise and find information, social bookmarking can help you to make your online content more visible and reach a larger audience.

Here are some of the things social bookmarking can do for your business website:

• Increase traffic
• Attract search engines
• Create quality inbound links
• Give another opportunity for branding

Social bookmarking best practices

As with all social media, some businesses can tend to abuse social bookmarking, miss the point of it, and end up alienating or annoying other users. Here are some tips to help you avoid this:

• Don’t bookmark useless websites
• Don’t spam and don’t only bookmark your own pages
• Don’t submit all your bookmarks at once – spread them out a bit
• Use several tags to make your links easier to find
• Choose the right categories for your bookmarks
• Provide useful comments on other submissions
• Engage with other social bookmarkers
• Don’t use automated software or services

If you use social bookmarking as it is intended it can be a very powerful business tool and an excellent addition to your social media marketing efforts, so take the time to do it properly and you’ll reap the rewards.