Social Bookmarking - It's a Popularity Thing

The concept of Social Bookmarking developed from the idea that regular Internet users would automatically bookmark their favorite websites on their own PC as a way of making sure that they kept all their favorites in the same place.

But, what could they do when they were not at their own PC? How were they to find or access their favorite websites then?

So, according to Wikipedia:

"Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public……"

So, the first important thing to note is that these bookmarks are 'usually public', so that if you do decide that a website is a favorite of yours, then other people can see that, and they can check it out too.

Furthermore, when the first social bookmarking sites became popular, they did so by coming up with a different way of classifying the site that people were listing, according to a relatively informal system of tags, rather than the more traditional 'folders' system that most people were using on their home or office computers.

So, a user could (and still can) add a favorite to their social bookmarking site list of favorites, and then choose their own tags for that site.

This tagging system allows sites to be found by social bookmarking site members by searching on a chosen tag, and the sites often include information about how popular a particular site is as judged by the number of people who have already bookmarked it

Some sites even provide web feeds (RSS) for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags, so that subscribers can automatically become aware of how many new viewers a site has, or how many sites have been added to the tagged group in question.

Some of these social bookmarking sites have become very popular indeed, with the more established sites like Del.icio.us and even relative newcomers to the 'game' like StumbleUpon having achieved Google Page Rank of 8.

Now, there are many sites already out there on the web where you can access fairly exhaustive lists of Social Bookmarking sites so there is no point in wasting time with a similar list here.  The important thing is not a long list of site URL's. The important thing is to really grasp and understand what these sites can do for you and your blog.

The first thing that you must do is to register for an account with each social bookmarking site. Then, every time that you make a new posting to your blog, you simply submit the post to the site in question.

Your posting and site address will generally appear on the home page of the site in question immediately after you submit it.
 
How long it then stays there is entirely dependent on the popularity of the bookmarking site itself, and to at least some extent, also on the time that he posting was submitted.

Will this drive masses of traffic to your site?

Well, it is certainly possible.

It is certainly feasible that someone might see your post and add it to their favorites, and the more people that do that, the longer your posting is likely to remain visible.

This is a particularly important factor on Digg, for example (remember that we added the Digg plug-in to your blog?).
 
If enough people 'digg' your story to keep it on the top pages, then it is almost impossible to imagine just how many visitors that this can drive to your site or blog!

I have literally seen websites use their whole allocated monthly bandwidth in one day as a result of a story really making it big on Digg!

But, in the vast majority of cases, the truth is, no, using social bookmarking sites is not likely to generate masses of traffic for your site.  But you should still do it for the simple reason that what it will do is create incoming links for your blog, and these links, as I have mentioned many times before are one of the two most important factors that help you achieve good search ranking.

These bookmarking sites are also very popular with the search engines themselves, and the spiders tend to visit them many times a day, so by making sure that your site is featured, you are making sure that your blog is going to achieve maximum levels of what is sometimes called 'search engine love'.

The downside is that, at the time of writing, there are no sites or software programs freely available that can 'mass submit' to all of the social bookmarking sites that you might want to have your blog appear in.

Thus, it can be a fairly tedious job making the submissions. A couple of tools that, whilst far from perfect, may nevertheless help you in your task, are OnlyWire, which claims to be able to submit your site to 22 social bookmark sites, and Socializer, which is supposed to work with over 40 similar sites.

Social Networking Sites

Social Networking sites are basically communities that you join and then search for people within the community with similar interests as you.

Now, some social networking sites are very small and focused, so by definition the people who join such sites are already members of a tightly focused interest group.

Such a group might be brought together by their political or religious beliefs, or it could be something such as their hobbies (they love Ford Mustangs or making cheesecake) sports or basically anything else that mankind has found it possible to be interested in!

So, in such a tightly focused group, almost all members without exception will be interested in the one common thing.

However, there are many other community sites where the only real common interest that most of the members could possibly ever have with one another is that they are all, in fact, members of the same site!

This is simply a function of the size and therefore the diversity of the sites in question, with websites like MySpace and FaceBook having literally millions of members all over the globe. (107 and 73 million members respectively)

 Such sites generally have a totally open membership,  meaning that anyone can become a member, no matter what their hobbies, beliefs, or views are.

Thus, there is no general community wide commonality of beliefs or interests either.

It is therefore only natural that once you are a member, inside this online community, you can begin to create your own network of friends, those that do have similar interest and/or beliefs to those of your own.

And this is where it gets interesting for you as an Internet marketer or online business person.

Firstly, if we use MySpace as our example (simply because whatever works on MySpace also works on almost every other social networking sit, albeit sometimes after a degree of 'finessing'), then you are looking at one of the ten biggest websites in the world.

Whatever your interests, given so many millions of members, then there will inevitably be others that have similar interests, people that you could potentially 'bond' with immediately.

For example, a MySpace search using the phrase 'traffic generation' returned 5,650 results. So that is over five and a half thousand people who might be interested in your traffic blog site from a direct 'match' of my search term to the specific subject topic of my blog site.

However, run a search for a more generic (and broader) term like Internet marketing, and you get 45,400 results.

Now, it is a very reasonable assumption that anyone who is interested in Internet marketing is trying to sell something on the net, and that they therefore need traffic to their website.

So, of course, these people would be legitimate 'target prospects' for what I am trying to promote also.

Take it one stage further and use single word search 'marketing' and it returns 549,000 results.

Again, it is reasonable to assume that all of these people are at least interested in bringing their products or services to the marketplace, so, once again, traffic generation could be of immense interest to them.

So, all I need to do is to tell them about the great resource that I have available, and that will be the 'deal done' right?

Err, no, not really, unless the 'deal' that you are talking about is having your MySpace 'space' and account closed down immediately!

The thing is that the folks who run MySpace really do not want their 'community site' turning into a commercial free-for-all, a sort of online bazaar, and they will go to any lengths to protect their site.

So, you cannot just open your account one day and start bombarding people with your commercial messages the next.

In the same way that, when you join any quality forum site, you have to establish yourself as a valid contributing member before you can start promoting your products or even adding a signature file with a redirect to a sales site, you must establish yourself on community websites too.  So, the first thing that you must do is to take some time and make an effort to create a proper profile, something that shows that there is a real person behind the newly opened account.

Then, you must start looking for 'friends' in the MySpace community, but you must do so gradually, as you are limited to so many friend invitations a day and, even if you weren't, inviting a thousand new friends a day hardly looks natural or normal, does it?

Put it this way – if you saw that someone was inviting 1000 new friends a day, would you perhaps thinks that there was something a little bit strange or artificial about it?

Correct – of course you would.

So, start to become a real member of the community before you start promoting, is the bottom line.

Sure, by all means begin to invite people to be your friends, but do try to spend a little time getting to know them and building up a relationship before trying to interest them in your business.

Now, the great thing about a blog site is that it is pretty natural that, after you have been someone's 'friend' for a while, that you might invite them to take a look at your blog.

That is far less threatening and direct than asking them to look at a 'full-on' sales page, for example.

Nevertheless, it doesn't matter what community site you are a member of, the secret is go gently and slowly, build relationships and try to nurture something at least vaguely like a 'real' friendship before trying to get people to visit your business themed blog site.

And, just in case MySpace and FaceBook, with a combined membership of 200 million members are not enough to keep you busy, we'll be listing many more such sites in upcoming articles!

Article by Web 2.0 Media Marketing

 

Tags: FaceBook, Myspace, social networking site, social bookmarking site

Tags: traffic generation with MyBlogLog, social networking sites, guides to social network marketing, FaceBook marketing