Social bookmarking Is the New Millenium “word of mouth”

Originally published in SiteProNews, October 9, 2007

Social bookmarking has finally got a foothold. Social bookmarking is being seen by many marketing experts as a cost effective method of augmenting distribution of content, branding and image building and marketing. According to a survey, it has been seen that almost 28% of users on the Internet on a normal day have been tagging online content while 7% of users on the Internet have been either tagging or categorizing content. This method is being seen as a highly successful idea and this can be seen with the amount of success achieved by http://Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us had acquired their first million visitors in 3 years but they acquired the next 2 million visitors within a span of 6 months. So what is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking can be compared to linking. Social bookmarks are basically links that help an internet user to classify, share, store and even search for content using a process called tagging. Tags just make it easier for internet users to find the content they are looking for. You can apply social bookmarks to content or information in different formats like PDF, video, blogs, websites, images etc.

Some of the top social bookmarking websites include StumbleUpon, http://del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and Furl. Reddit and Dig are two social news websites, which are also considered as social bookmarking sites. The idea is to create positive content about your services, products or overall business and then optimizing the content on these social bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking is an interesting concept that can be used for enhancing the process of marketing and promotions. What marketers can really do is allow sharing of content by the visitors. As a result, the bookmarks encourage a kind of functionality that is most often referred to as forward-to-a-friend process. Apart from this, marketers can also post their own content on different social bookmarking websites, which will initiate movement of traffic to their sites. In a sense, this is an online version word of mouth advertising where surfers share their bookmarks.

But for social bookmarking to be a real success, you need to have engaging or interactive content, which users will find useful, interesting and entertaining. It should be the kind of content that most users can recommend to others or forward it. The content should attract users and this is where creativity plays an important role. You will have to look from the perspective of an internet user to gauge what he or she might be looking for and then provide it. There are certain tips you can follow to make social bookmarking a marketing success for your online business and they are:

Understand the requirement of your audience and try to focus on topics that will interest your readers, audience or users.

Content should be interesting and yet easy to read. The more heavy words and sentences you use, the more difficult and unfriendly it will be for the reader. Look at the blogs – most blogs have reader friendly and more personalized content. Apart from this, you can also add bold and colored or highlighted fonts to assist in increasing readability.

The title should be interesting and hint at what the article is all about. If you want to provide information only on Pay-per-click then there is no point having a title like “The best internet marketing tools.” Readers will think that this article encompasses all the methods and it will be useless for a reader who wants specialized information about Pay-per-click. On the other hand if you have a title like “Less money, more traffic using Pay-per-click” This title will attract the attention of readers looking for specialized information on Pay-per-click and other readers who want information on internet marketing methods.

Keywords are extremely important in bringing traffic to your website. Use of keywords is a key factor that drives search engine optimization. If you don’t use the required amount of keywords then internet users or readers might not be able to find your article using the Google or Yahoo search engines.

Using a content format that will ensure readability is important. If the size of your font is too small then it might be difficult for most of the readers to appreciate the content however important the information provided by you may be. If you want users to tag your content then it is important that you place buttons at the top or the bottom of your article. You can also avoid clutter by including bookmark option of only those social bookmarking communities that are best linked to your business.

These are some of the ways by which, you can use social bookmarking to your advantage.