You’ve probably heard the buzz about social media marketing (SMM). One of the components of SMM is social bookmarking. With the right advice and the right strategy, you can use social bookmarking to boost links to your company site and increase your site’s relevance for the keywords that pertain to your business.

The Opportunities in Social Bookmarking

Inbound links to your website are tremendously important to your search engine ranking. In fact, most search engine marketing experts believe that Google’s ranking algorithm is weighted far more heavily towards links than it is to keywords.

SMM offers many ways to generate these links for little or no cost – articles, social media sites and blogs are just a few examples. Social bookmarking is another.

With bookmarking, you save bookmarks to blog posts, articles and web pages (including your own). You tag them with a “keyword” of your own choosing (preferably related to your business). You can then add a “tag cloud” to your website. The tag cloud contains the tags you have created and directs users to the bookmarks you have saved for that tag.

What is the benefit for your business? Each bookmark links to your website or blog. With tag clouds, each keyword appears on your site, increasing the site’s relevance. Between the bookmarking site and the tag cloud on your website, you have a really great cross-promotional tool that opens up myriad opportunities for people to find you.

Consider the website of a Toronto marketing firm. They have a tag cloud with words like Toronto, search marketing, social media, blogging and so on. Each time someone visits their site, that person can click a tag and find the company’s bookmarks. They can then share those bookmarks with other users, which will point those users back to the marketing firm’s site.

Going in the other direction, people searching a bookmarking site may find the marketing firm’s bookmarks. Seeing that the company has posted some interesting and valuable articles on online marketing, they decide to visit the company’s site and add it to their social bookmarking network.

The Challenges of Social Bookmarking for Businesses

Like any kind of social media marketing, social bookmarking is low-cost, at least in terms of money. Where the “costs” escalate is in time. To do social bookmarking right, you need time to evaluate the various sites, add your bookmarks, comment on them, and interact with other users who share your interests. It is a big job.

Let’s look at the first step – deciding which sites to use. If you do a search for the top social bookmarking sites, you’ll get a huge list, like the one published on ebizMBA. So which ones do you choose? Delicious is one of the biggest, but would it be better to go for a smaller site, like furl or faves.com? Is it better to use all three, plus some social news sites, like Digg or Reddit?

Once you have made that decision, you need to decide how and when you will create the content you want to bookmark. Blogs, articles – what is the right amount of content and how often do you need to create it? You can really only answer that question by looking at social bookmarking as part of your overall social media marketing plan.

Answers to Your Social Media Marketing Questions

Social bookmarking and social media marketing are powerful marketing tools. To make the most of them you need to devote a lot of attention to the sites and create content regularly. You also need a comprehensive social media marketing plan that incorporates all of your content initiatives and your efforts to create bookmarks that direct people to that content.

A marketing agency that specializes in SMM can get you started. They can help you navigate the sites, schedule your content and get involved in the social media sphere. Even if you just sign on for a short-term contract to get started, you will find the SMM firm an invaluable partner in your “new media” marketing plans.



By: Jane Fields

With the fast and effective way of how internet technology has improved communication, marketing and transfer of information from a source, social bookmarking has played an important role with its efficiency and reliability. As what is known about social bookmarking, social bookmarking is an organized method of how bookmarks of web pages are stored, organized, searched and managed. It allows internet users to share the web pages they want with friends and selected people in a group. It allows you easy access by simply logging in any computer. Most people use browser-based method. Social bookmarking lets you employ personalized tags. Bookmarking sites give you added information by measuring how reputable a website is as compared to other sites. New ideas are at reach when you use social bookmarking because it is easier for you to look what others have visited and done. You will be able to visit and discover favorites done and visited by others.

The best social reason why you need to be bookmarked is the benefit of being connected with your friends, family, and people you work with. You will be able to share the websites you love with anybody close to you. It allows you to save time and effort from everybody close to you and even for yourself by knowing what particular thing they prefer as a gift, interest, hobby, or need.

Social bookmarking is now an important promotional tool that you can use. If you own a website and wanted to enhance it, social bookmarking has several beneficial features that you can use at your advantage for optimizing search engines.

Search engines are also compatible with social bookmarkings. If your own website appears on the front page of a search engine, expect an increase in traffic. An increase in traffic will mean that your website will be exposed to inbound links. This in turn will make you popular and increases your page rank. This is a form of a viral campaign that is of your advantage. Your web site will be more noted in the internet and will gain an assured popularity.

Repeat visitors are gained with social bookmarking. Most visitors do not register or take action on their first visit to your website. However, if visitors will visit your website again, chances are, they will be taking actions on their next visit. The more visit, the more chances of taking action. The more bookmarking options, the more visitors will likely to return. However, you have to make sure that your website will have quality content. This will make anybody to bookmark your page.

Social bookmarking existed several years before and people will always discover new concepts about the bookmarking world especially with the fields of marketing and promotion. Many have benefited from its advantages and new ideas are still being developed to maximize its use. The online marketing industry and community eye social marketing as one of their major tools in the future. No wonder many social bookmarking sites have come to provide the basic advantages and enjoy the benefits of social bookmarking.



By: Eabharoid