How to use Social Bookmarking Websites for your Business

Social bookmarking isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s popularity is on the rise. All social bookmarking websites are different but essentially they all allow users to share, manage and save links to web pages that they find interesting, informative or entertaining. Some of the largest and most popular of these sites include Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Diigo and Delicious.

There are a number of ways that using social bookmarking websites could help your business. Let’s take a look at some of them…

1. Social bookmarking sites can be a great source of inspiration. Sometimes you can come across web pages that you didn’t know you were looking for but that are extremely useful to you. Many social bookmarking sites allow you to sign up to categories you are interested in and will show you pages related to those categories. For example, I am signed up to the ‘Web Development’ interest on Stumble Upon (my personal favourite site) and often get to see articles about new trends or advice that I can take on board and apply to my business.

2. Invite others to bookmark your website’s content. Allow others the opportunity to give your articles or blog posts their seal of approval by including social bookmarking sharing buttons on your website. There are many widgets, plugins and browser extensions available to do this. Check out this comparison of 10 widgets.

3. Submit your own links and articles to social bookmarking sites. If you have posted an article, image or video to your own site that you think will be of interest to a wider audience, share it. This can be a great way of introducing interested parties to your blog or website and could be a great way of gaining regular readers.

4. Use of social bookmarking can be utilised as part of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. A link to your website on a social bookmarking site is not going to carry as much weight as a link on an authoritative website but there is still value in it. Just remember not to bombard these sites with links to your website as this could be considered spam and search engines like Google could penalise you for this.

Do you use social bookmarking sites for your business? What value do they provide to you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.