Social Bookmarking In A Rush

social bookmark
Freddy Escobar asked:

Social bookmarking has become a common term within the internet surfers. What exactly means? Why social bookmarking is important for marketers? What’s the benefit of social bookmarking sites? Let’s quickly answer these questions…

What is Social Bookmarking

Definition from Wiki:

On a Social Bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly.

Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format – feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries,etc. – can be found.

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis. They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them.

Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

Why Social Bookmarking is important for marketers?

Suppose you just created your Website or Blog. Now What? Your site needs to be spidered and indexed in the search engines. One of the fast ways to accomplish this is via Social Bookmarks. By bookmarking your own sites, your site will be indexed and have an initial backlinks to jump up in the Search Engine Rankings.

Also in order to have a successful and profitable Blog or Website you need traffic. There are many sources of information regarding ways to bring traffic to your site, but Social Bookmarking is one of the easiest ways with multiple benefits.

These methods are perfectly ethical and you shouldn’t have any concerns doing them.

Benefits of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.

The benefit is two fold. They provide immediate traffic from like-minded targeted viewers but also powerful backlinks to your sites that bring positive SEO and Search Engine results.

In summary, social bookmarking has been created to bring upfront the relevant information created and uploaded to the internet. The beauty of the system is that users are the ones who “vote” for the good content. In this way it’s a sure way to find the best stories and the best content in the front pages of these sites. Therefore, the traffic bookmarking sites generate has exponentially increased during the last years. Savvy marketers are finding its way to get a share of this traffic.

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The Rise of Social Bookmarking

social bookmark
Mike Kofi Okyere asked:

Social bookmarking is fast becoming the next best thing for webmasters and web users around the globe. So, what are social bookmarking sites and where did they originate from?

Social bookmarking is an online method of storing, organizing, sharing and searching bookmarks of selected web pages. A bookmarking site allows members to save links they have an interest in, as well as sharing them with others web users. These links are generally viewed;

• In chronological order

• In order of popularity

• By selecting a specific tag

• Randomly

To look at the history of social bookmarking we have to go back to 1996 with the launch of the website itLists.com, this was the first site to utilise the concept of shared bookmarks. A few years later this idea was followed by companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks and Quiver. These companies however failed to make an impact on the market due to the dot com crash of 2001. We then had to wait until 2003 when del.icio.us launched its own tag related social bookmarking site. In a short space of time del.icio.us expanded very quickly, this led to other companies following their lead. In the next few years websites such as Simpy, Furl, Stumbleupon, Netvouz, Diigo, Digg, reddit, Newsvine joined the fray and expanded on the priciples of social bookmarking.

Social bookmark sites encourage their members to organize their own bookmarks using specific tags. Some sites vary slightly by implementing a combination of folders and tags. The methods used to organize bookmarks vary slightly but the general principles remain the same.

Many social bookmarking websites provide an RSS feed. This enables members to receive information on new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by others. Another common feature is to allow members to rate and comment on bookmarks, this has become very popular with web users worldwide. Receiving information via a live feed is a very good method of carrying out research or simply reading the research of others.

Rather than slowing down, social bookmarking is growing at a phenomenal pace, this is due to web users realising they can gather information on specific or niche topics from a single source. As we move towards full web 2.0 compliance, it is of no surprise that social bookmarking sites are giving us a glimpse of how the World Wide Web will be structured in the future. Bookmarking sites have certainly brought a degree of order to the Internet, in the past this has always been a problem area for web users, as they generally have to visit many sites to gather information on a single subject.

The main downside to social bookmarking is in the fact webmasters quickly realised these sites are a great medium for search engine optimisation, this has led to bookmarking sites being hit hard by spammers. I believe this will be short lived as many sites are starting to incorporate the ‘no-follow’ attribute.

My personal feelings are we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in regard to social bookmarking, in the future I believe these type of websites will be fully integrated into our online way of life.

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