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Social Bookmarking
What Are Social Bookmarks?
Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, share and search their favourite web pages.In a social bookmarking system, users save links (bookmarks) to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service's features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private.
The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly. (from Wikipedia)
Here's a screencast that explains the benefits of using social bookmarking sites and the associated terms.
What Are The Major Social Bookmarking Sites?
What Are The Differences Between The Major Social Bookmarking Sites?
The major sites have a domino effect when success is reached. Often by getting on the front page of Digg your articles will succeed better in Reddit and Stumbleupon. Success in any of these communities often leads to the content being submitted to more niche communities as well as bookmark sites like Delicious.
Digg is the most popular social news site. Out of all the categories on the site, the "Technology", "World News & Business", and "Offbeat" are the most popular. Getting something on the frontpage of Digg can drive 20,000 to 100,000 visitors over a couple of days, in addition to 100's of unique links to your post.
Reddit is the second largest social news site on the web. Unlike Digg, Reddit is much more political and science oriented. though other good content is also routinely featured. Because the friend system on Reddit is highly restrictive, only articles that are strictly pertinent to the community will succeed. Successful stories on Reddit can bring 5,000 to 20,000 visitors but drive virtually zero long-term traffic. Unlike Digg, content submitted to Reddit can drive traffic even without getting popular.
StumbleUpon is a unique social community that utilizes a toolbar to view pages that are voted positively in catagories you subscribe to. Unlike the other sites, content here doesn't have to be popular at all. StumbleUpon utilizes an excellent recommendation system (based on categories you tell them you like, and content that you have voted on previously). In addition to that, the site also has a popular content page called StumbleUpon Buzz.Typical traffic from StumbleUpon depends on the category it is associated with and can range from 3,000 to 20,000 UVs in a week. Artistic and creative content is most successful on StumbleUpon.
Propeller is similar in nature to Digg, and similar in community preferences to Reddit. Unlike the other social communities, Propeller only publishes a certain number of articles from each category to the front page each day. Stories reaching the front page can receive up to 10,000 UVs in a day as well as acquire a decent amount of links. In addition to community-based promotion, Propeller stories can also be manually picked by hired moderators, to be featured at the top of the site.
General Features
Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them.Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.
How Can Communicators Use Social Bookmarking Sites?
Keyword optimization: Search any major social bookmarking sites listed above and see what is being bookmarked and what tags are being applied, this will provide new insight to how people think about your offeringBrand monitoring and competitive intelligence: observing what tags are associated with a bookmark and other links in cloud provide insight into how a community groups you with others who are similar.
Message reinforcement: as a service provider you can get entire teams to sharebook and tag on behalf of your organization. Sharing a tag cloud on your blog can help reinforce areas of speciality. The interactive agency Organic does a great job of this on their blog http://www.threeminds.com/
Pros
- Allows people to discover your product or service in other context of their mental model at a point in time, you are not interrupting them.
- New visitors to your site are likely to be more interested as they "found" you versus you finding them
Cons
- You may end up being tagged along side your competition
- Tags can be negative
Case Studies
Latest page update: made by kanter
, Feb 23 2008, 6:51 PM EST
(about this update
About This Update
Edited by kanter
16 words added
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Edited by kanter
16 words added
view changes
- complete history)
Keyword tags:
Delicious
Digg
social bookmarks
social media
StumbleUpon
More Info: links to this page