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A simple business guide to Social Bookmarking

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• Bookmark
• Business
• Promotion
• Small Business
• Social bookmarking
• Web Design and Development
• Web search engine
• Why Social Media

Social Bookmarking is one one element of a Small to Medium businesses Social Media Marketing plan.

Social Bookmarking can be really good at helping bring more traffic to your site or to add credibility to your articles.

Basic Understanding of Social Bookmarking

When you find a site or on-line article of interest you can bookmark the site in your browser for later reference.   But there are limitations with this:

Organizing and Searching

Being forever on the net doing market research, I am always finding sites or web articles that I think I would like to look at later.  The problem is that in reality I end up with so many bookmarked pages and a really bad structure for filing them – that I can never find them again.

Some pages I book marked, could well have been filed under market research, hire industry data or even say social media statistics. Trying to remember where I put it became a real brain ache.

Sharing

The next limitation is sharing the articles with other people.  Aside from not wanting to download every site or article and waste bandwidth, I want to be easily able to share articles with others.   This is achievable using the browser bookmark system but it is cumbersome.

Others Opinions

If I do share an article I would like to track their opinions and how valuable they think the article is.   Also how they would categorize the article, ie what keywords would they file it under?

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking solves these limitations.  It enables you to:

• Book mark a site or article of interest;
• Save the link;
• Organise your links by using multiple tags;
• Search by for your links by tags;
• Include other people publicly saved articles who have used the same tags, hence enriching your search; and
• Assess the value of an article based on others people opinions and ratings.

Why you should do it!

It is this last point that offers the real value to a small business.

If you create an article, lets say through your blog, you can submit it to a Social Bookmarking site.

More Readers. The first reason you would submit the article is that it potentially offers the opportunity to attract more readers.  The social bookmarking site creates a new link from their site back to your blog, good for in-bound links.

Credibility. Others can read the article and rate it as well as make comments. The credibility of the article is increased the more others rate it well or comment accordingly. Yes there is a risk of the reverse happening as well.

Keywords. Other reading a good article may often tag that article with their own keywords.  These tags along with yours are then indexed by search engines.  This can be great for the search engine ranking of your article which in turn can flow through to more traffic to your site.

A well done article can be incredibly powerful in increasing traffic to your site!

Managing the Risks

Social bookmarking technology is generally free and easy to use. However whilst the technology is easy to understand the social groups that use may not be.

If you ever changed school can you remember the first day? The way they talked, the terms they used and what they talked about?

If you were smart you just listened for a while until you got use to them and their cultural norms. Hey why risk being labeled a “dork” better to just hang back for a while.

Social Bookmarking groups are exactly the same. Each social bookmarking service, and there are a number of them, seems have its own distinctive culture or informal rules and interests.

Social Bookmarking Services

There are numerous social bookmarking services.  But as discussed above it pays to select the right one for you.  This article gives a brief summary of each of the top ten and their focus.

Finally

The benefits of social bookmarking for small to medium businesses can be excellent.

But remember it is social by nature, so spend time getting to know the community of followers for your selected social bookmarking service.  Watch the types of articles that are most popular and unpopular.  Take the time to comment and rate others community members posts. Invest time in becoming known as a good community member and they will reciprocate.