Social Bookmarking as Part of Your Strategy

Writing by Brick Marketing in Social Media

When businesses decide that they are going to get into the social media game they automatically think of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. While those sites are each valuable for different reasons, it’s important not to forget about social bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon each receive respectable amounts of traffic. People are using these sites to share content and discover new content and it’s one more place to get your brand seen. In fact, StumbleUpon has even surpassed Facebook as the leading source of traffic from social media. Obviously, this is something to pay attention to. A social bookmarking strategy is important for many reasons. It obviously helps to build links, but it also drives traffic to your website and improves brand visibility. Here are 4 social bookmarking tips:

Create Content Worth Sharing
Before you can share links on social bookmarking sites, you obviously have to create content that is worth sharing. You don’t want to be caught sharing lots of low quality links because you will be ignored at best and flagged as spam and have your account shut down at worst. Each time you share a link in social media, that link is a representation of your brand. Do you really want to be sharing poorly written or flimsy content on behalf of your business just to try and build some links? When it comes to content marketing, quality is always more important than quantity. If it’s not going to provide target audience members with any kind of value, don’t bother writing it and certainly don’t bother sharing it.

Be Consistent
Every quality piece of content that you create should be shared on social bookmarking sites. Set aside part of every day to sharing content across social networks and social bookmarking sites. Content is only valuable if people see it, right? So be sure to give that content a chance to get noticed.

Discover Niche Sites
Just like there are niche social networks, there may be niche social bookmarking sites to submit content to depending on your industry. Of course, a niche site will have less visitors and less traffic, but because it is specific to your business that means that the audience is much more targeted. The big social networking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit cater to everybody and really any kind of content can be shared there. There’s much more competition for a visitor’s attention so finding a niche social bookmarking site can be advantageous.

Allow Others to Submit on Your Behalf
The more people that submit your content in social bookmarking sites, the better the chances are that the content will be seen, read, and that website traffic will be generated. Encourage others to share your content by including share buttons. This will help improve visibility and contribute to SEO efforts since the search engines pay attention to social signals, or how often content is shared socially.