Social bookmarking has always been a great way to share interesting online finds with your friends and family. But did you know that you can use social media and social bookmarking tools to improve your web presence, and even help boost sales?
First of all, it’s helpful to know exactly what social bookmarking is. Social bookmarking is, simply put, a means of sharing things online. Bookmarking pages act as a kind of repository for anything interesting you happen to stumble across in your online wanderings. Let’s say you just watched the latest music video by The Greatest Band Ever, and you want all your friends to see it too. You simply include a link to the video on your social bookmarking page (Delicious, Digg, Reddit, etc.) and both you and anyone who subscribes to your page can see what you’ve posted.
Social bookmarking started out small. Back in 1996, “itList” was the first true bookmarking service, which provided a mechanism for storing private links as well as shared, public links. Through the many iterations and improvements, social bookmarking has also been integrated with social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.), so that bookmarking and social media interaction can be located in one convenient landing page.
What does this mean for your business? It means that there is a huge platform out there for people to see, like, and share information about you, your products, and any information you provide. However, the size of that platform can sometimes seem daunting without a few handy manual or automatic social bookmarking tools. These tools can submit your links to multiple bookmarking sites at once (or over a specified period of time) to spread the word about your company that much faster.
The more people know about you, the more they’ll share your info with their friends and family, and the more the Internet search engines will come to see your site as an authority in your particular field. The more your’e seen by the search engines as an authority, the higher they’ll place your page when someone searches for keywords related to your business. And the more people will know about you. It’s a tidy little marketing circle, and social bookmarking tools and services can help you make the rounds even faster.
Manual social bookmarking services and automated social bookmarking tools can be a marketer’s best friend when it comes to search engine optimization (also called SEO). Worried about paying for a service like this? Bear in mind that for every one dollar you spend on Internet marketing, you make an average of $22. If you provide helpful, memorable, and ultimately share-worthy content, your marketing dollars will generate their own momentum, as people post your links to their pages for the sheer joy of sharing information with their friends and family.
