Since I’m new to social bookmarking myself, I thought I’d ask my LinkedIn network for their thoughts. As always, I got some great ideas from them, including strategies I might not have thought up myself.
On of the main uses of social bookmarking is sharing of links. Whether it’s for people using multiple computers (one at home and one at the office) or people with multiple employees who need to share links, this is one obvious use of sites like Delicious or StumbleUpon.
Even if you’re a solo-preneur, this can be useful for sharing information with colleagues. Knowing what sites they link to can drastically reduce research time. If they’ve already sifted through some sites and saved the best, you can go with their links.
And if you’ve ever had a computer crash and lost all your bookmarks, you know how important a backup is. A couple of years ago I lost all my Firefox bookmarks and nearly cried. Thankfully my husband was able to show me how to locate the backup but I had a few really stressful hours until he got home. In the future this won’t happen because I’m now saving links to my browser and Delicious.
But sharing and saving links isn’t the only way my network uses social bookmarking. Jason Barone, a Small Business Technology Consultant at Real Success Dynamics & AgentFusion uses Delicious for research.
“I just search using a Firefox extension to look for the highest “bookmarked” sites for that particular topic. Believe it or not, these results are usually way better than Search Engine results most of the time because of one simple thing–they’re ranked by humans.”
Of course, not everyone agrees. Erica Friedman, President of Yuricon wrote: “Since my modus operandi is “relevance” I avoid measures that rely on popularity as an indicator. Even if a new item is relevant to 6 billion other people, I may not (and often do not) care.”
Clearly it is a personal preference and probably a matter of what subjects you are research that decides whether social bookmarking sites are a useful researching tool. I’d suggest trying both social bookmarking and search engines next time you are looking for something and compare results. If you do, please check back and let us know which fared better.
But what I really wanted to know is can you use social bookmarking as a networking and marketing tool, just like Facebook or LinkedIn? Several people in my network tell me yes.
Gary Reichel wrote: “The strategy is very similar to traditional social networking. Just like joining a chamber of commerce … the first thing is to make friends. Don’t start by pushing your services or products.”
Sounds like good advice.
Now if you want to get fancy, Jason Barone has advice for using social bookmarking to increase traffic to your site.
“Not only should you bookmark your own page and articles, but also bookmark every single page that links back to your site. It’s a simple principal really–if someone is linking back to your site, make their site more popular by bookmarking it and commenting on it. Their increased traffic/popularity/pagerank will likely create a domino effect back to your site.”
This bookmarking of other sites will likely have another domino effect, assuming the sites you bookmark are quality sites. First, people whose sites you bookmark will notice you’ve done it. If they’re trying to build traffic, they’ll be pleased and start paying more attention to what you do. And like all social media, this is one step in building a relationship with people.
If you’re ready to start exploring social bookmarking, please look me up. On Delicious my user name is AndreaStenberg. On StumbleUpon I’m astenberg.
See you on social media.
Andrea J. Stenberg
