What is social bookmarking? Is it bookmarking all of your social media, keeping it together and organized somehow? No, it is a public forum for bookmarking favourite sites, saving them to how many social bookmarking sites you would like. You can also save them privately and share them with specific people or groups. Social bookmarking dates back to April 1996, grew in the early 2000's, and it has really taken hold in the last few years. It went from a few sites to now over 250 sites, pretty amazing is it not?
The Wikipedia's definition is "Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them."
Like most social media sites, you create a profile, search for groups or people you would like to connect with, and then bookmark sites you come across that you believe would benefit your target market, clients, friends etc.
One way to use social bookmarking for a business is you can look for articles relevant to your target market. This will help you in a couple of ways, if your target market is writing articles you can see what they want and need and respond back with an appropriate answer. It is also a good way to provide your target market with up-to-date information regarding their market.
Another way social bookmarking is great for a business is, of course, to encourage traffic to your website. There are many ways to organize and tag the sites to optimize keywords. Like all your writing, good headlines and content are very important. Although you are bookmarking a site, you can put some information in the post with the bookmark. It is not a good idea to bookmark your own information, but you should make it easy on all your social media sites for people to click on a share button to all the bookmarking sites. It is good to encourage people you know to vote for your page and then it may start others to vote, you only need 50 votes on Digg to get you to the top page.
There are other guidelines to follow like any other Medias. Check all your facts, check your spelling, do not self promote, do not spam, etc. You get to know what is needed and what is not as there are many, many sites available. I have a site of the top 15 social bookmarking sites as of February 2011, and that is what I will work with.
Your social media sites have programs like TweetDeck and HootSuite to keep them all organized and easily accessible to post. Social bookmarking has a great program that basically does the same. You can bookmark a site to all social bookmarking sites in one program. The program is called socialmarket.com and it is free and an easy program to use.
Should you not have the time to create all of this but really would like to make this part of your business, there are many qualified businesses out there to get you on the right road.
Social Bookmarks