Ever have web pages and videos you want to save or share with a specific friend or group of friends, relatives, or coworkers?
So do other people. The question then arises how to organize these favorites or most useful sites. Social bookmarking sites exist to organize what people find interesting. The one doing the sharing tags the preferred site on a given social bookmarking site with a word or words which describe the topic or content.
The tags, and sometimes descriptions, serve as handles to organize the sites for future reference. So if a group of people like your content or if you use social bookmarking sites to refer to your content, traffic to your sites can increase. If the tags accurately represent your content, the traffic can be targeted to your content.
Unfortunately, there are no standards for making tags, which introduces certain kinds of problems, and bookmarking sites have been subject to spamming and collusion abuse. And friends in various instances can limit the exposure of a given site reference to a small or private group. But on the whole, search engines still see value in bookmarking as a means to provide searchers with the content they seek. And you can get back links to your site this way.
Here is a brief list of some of the social bookmarking sites with heavier traffic. The list is ordered more or less from the most to the least traffic as of the time of this writing–save for the last entry, which serves to download to a number of social bookmarking sites at once.
Digg – for social news, videos, and images
Technorati – for blog searches
Del.icio.us
Stumbleupon – The “stumble upon” button randomly selects content in a given topic.
Mixx
Slashdot
Propeller.com – news
Folkd
Citeulike – scholarly and academic articles
Diigo – personal data saved or work collaboratively
Sphinn – for internet marketing
Faves
Blinklist
Simpy
Connotea – “Free online reference management for all researchers, clinicians and scientists”
Blogmarks
Onlywire – downloads to multiple bookmarking sites at once. Free (with ads) or paid (no ads) versions available.
Useful as social bookmarking may be for getting back links to one’s site, one wonders if Facebook won’t dominate in many ways. In any case as usual, the best long term strategy is to provide and share content people are looking for.
Tags: bookmarking
Social media has really been powerful. There are many people who have been using it, might be a celebrity, a businessman a politician or even an ordinary person. It has already made a mark on every individual.
Agreed. At present, Facebook is exploding in numbers AND time on site, Twitter numbers are leveling off, Myspace is declining slightly. This illustrates how some sites will gain and others lose, but on the whole, social media appears here to stay for social friendship groups and targeted business ad broadcasting. And various businesses will probably continue to be frustrated with the time suck of social media; the winsome and winners in this arena will be ones to watch.