Reading Time: 3 minutesOver the last several years social bookmarking has proven to be a great tool to help market businesses and increase website traffic. The concept behind social bookmarking is to provide users with a simple way to bookmark their favorite websites, articles, stories and more online, and in one central location. This also allows users to access these resources anytime and from anywhere, as opposed to saving it on one computer.
How to Use Social Bookmarking for Business
The beauty of social bookmarking is that it provides a relatively easy way to increase site traffic, interact with consumers, share content, build your web presence, and cultivate business relationships. These sites allow users to comment, rate, share and add tags (keywords) to the material you post or to any information/links on your company they have found online.
Some bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us have the ability to increase your site traffic to numbers you could have never imagined due to their strong web presence and popularity. These sites offer great analytics tools to aid in marketing your business. The information provided will allow you to track the specific links a user clicked to access your site. This data can help you to better understand your current audience demographics, which areas of your marketing campaign you may need to improve upon, if you are reaching your intended audience, and can possibly provide some new, untapped marketing and business opportunities.
Big Bang for No Buck
One of the greatest qualities of social bookmarking is the cost. To use some of the most popular sites will not cost you anything to sign-up and get started. New content is being added to the internet constantly, but with the help of your social bookmarking community members, your content and brand has the ability to stay fresh and in rotation, which will increase site/brand visibility and new visitors to your site. These sites can save you time and resources by providing for free what other sites would charge you thousands of dollars to generate.
Getting Started
Building your social bookmarking profiles is a quick and easy process, in most cases. Here are some quick tips to get you started:
- If you already have a company blog or page that is updated regularly, building a profile on these sites will be a breeze. However, if you do not have these resources currently, start by bookmarking your home page and then work through your inner pages while you work on starting a blog and/or a designated “promotional” type of page for your website.
- Begin building your network and sharing your content, as well as other content related to your industry.
- No one likes a spammer and members of social bookmarking communities are no different. Try to create a nice balance between posting promotional content and content related to your industry or posted by others. This will ensure you do not cause an adverse effect and lose members of your targeted audience.
While you are building your profile be sure to pay close attention to highly ranked/shared competitors within in your industry, the type of content they are providing and the type of users they are attracting. Knowing how to effectively capture the attention of your intended audience is essential if you want to reap all the benefits social bookmarking sites can provide. When used properly, social bookmarking can be an effective and cost-efficient tool to get traffic to your website and build your brand in the process.
