Most small business owners are now familiar with the most popular social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. However, there is another group of sites that can help drive traffic to your website and organize, manage, search and store bookmarks of resources pertinent to your industry and/or target market. These sites are called social bookmarking sites.
Social bookmarking sites give you the opportunity to share links to web sites, specific web pages, or blog posts to a large potential audience. You can also bookmark or save links to other websites or web pages that you want to reference. Most social bookmarking sites encourage users to organize their bookmarks with tags or keywords so that they are easily categorized and found by others. Many of the bookmarking sites also have features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, importing and exporting bookmarks from browsers, and social networking elements.
Here are a few of the more popular and valuable social bookmarking websites that your small business should explore.
Digg:
Digg focuses on story or blog submission and a voting system and is often called a social news website. Users are able to keep up to date on the latest news and current events. You may submit your latest blog posts or articles to Digg and other users can vote them up or down. The story or post with the most “diggs” makes the front page. Digg has an estimated 45 million unique monthly visitors, and that’s a large potential pool of viewers to your content.
StumbleUpon:
On StumbleUpon, users can rate websites, blog posts, photos and videos. The service creates virtual communities of users who have similar interests. Links to web pages or posts are displayed based upon users’ “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” ratings. Ratings update the website or web page profile and creates a social network that distributes the content you submitted on a wide network. So, users can “stumble upon” your content that has been recommended by your peers and friends.
Reddit:
Similar to Digg, Reddit also offers an extra feature. In addition to being able to submit links to your content, you are also able to make posts and submit your original content within it. Like the other sites discussed, users are ablet to rate the links and content.
Delicious:
Delicious is quite popular and allows users to tag bookmarks using index terms. Other users are then able to tag their bookmarks under the same index term and create a collection of bookmarks that reference a similar interest.
Diigo:
Diigo gives you the ability to take personal notes and highlight content on web pages just as you would on a piece of paper. You are then able to bookmark,tag and save the highlighted content for further review. You are also able to share your bookmarked content with friends with others.
Social bookmarking websites can help your business gain access to multiple networks and communities. Create an account with one of the sites above and bookmark your blog posts and articles every time you post in order to spread your reach. Get involved with a bookmarking community and interact with others in your industry or your target market. You’ll increase the visibility of your content, which can benefit your business.