Social bookmarking

Blogs produce a unique link for each article, which allows bloggers to treat each article as a separate campaign. And the best part: if you create an alias for this page link, using a clever combination of your domain name with keywords from the article means that you’ve almost optimised your site for search engines.


Many blogs offer social bookmarking buttons to promote posts. According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is a web-based service to share Internet bookmarks. Social bookmarking (SB) sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. One of the more popular SB sites is del.icio.us. After creating an account in minutes, users bookmark favourite pages. A first major feature of bookmarking sites is tagging - rather than organising bookmarks in directories, as would happen in the favourites folder of internet explorer, users attach multiple tags to bookmarks. Secondly, bookmarks are shared, giving users an indicator of their popularity. Finally, users can comment and sometimes rate/vote on bookmarks.

Now what happens if you offer SB buttons on your blog: users having an account with an SB site can bookmark your articles with a single click. If a user bookmarks a page of your blog, this link will have a prominent position on the roll of some SB sites, until the next link is bookmarked. This prominent position is a great way to launch content. But for a tool such as del.icio.us, the appearance on the home page will be normally less than a minute, which will not do much. Here, your hope is that several users bookmark the same article, so that it becomes popular in its tag category.

Social bookmarking does not come without pitfalls. Self-promotion tends to be frowned upon. And because of its ease of use, SB is a highly competitive and noisy environment. It’s also a medium more oriented towards a general public than towards professionals.

It’s worth checking the culture of various SB tools before getting involved. Digg.com is more (internet) technology oriented. Care2.com focusses on environmental and social causes. And some sites, such as reddit.com can be a bit abrasive at times.

Finally, if you want to avoid going through the trouble of selecting and adding individual SB buttons on your site, use addthis.com, giving all buttons in one, leaving the choice to the user. At the same time, addthis gives a comprehensive overview of SB tools currently available.