Read an interesting blog post lately? Save it. Want to share it with others? Tag it and make it publicly accessible online. Or maybe you just want a safe place to save an article you will get around to reading on your weekly dive into your del.icio.us account. No problem. Social Bookmarking and Tagging both have this covered for you.
Social bookmarking and tagging aren’t just about saving items for you anymore. Revert back to your preschool rules, and you will find social bookmarking is just “sharing†on a global level. How else can you research and trade information with thousands and thousands of people all around the world in an up-to-the-minute fashion?
Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of NVI, gave us definitions of social bookmarking and tagging. Social bookmarking allows users to store, organize, search and share information with other users. Tagging is a collaborative practice and a method to help others search for what they want to find. Tagging also can alert us to when new information is available.
A real-time example of this tagging effect happened just a couple hours ago during this session. At the beginning of the event, Danny Sullivan asked us all to tag our posts and images and videos with the tag “smxsocial†so they are alerted when new content from the conference goes live. So this afternoon, I saw the person ahead of me posting to his blog about the chairs we are all sitting in today at SMX Social. As soon as I saw my neighbor post this story to his blog, I sat and waited. Sure enough, 30 minutes later Danny gets up in front of the audience and says “I have never been to a conference where the chairs have been described as ‘butt-numbing’ before.â€
Guillaume also outlined the benefits of social bookmarking and tagging for us at the beginning of the session. The top two benefits of social bookmarking, he stated, were helping a website rank better on search engines and can achieve a huge amount of natural links to the website. One huge benefit of tagging is that you can easily see how other users have tagged their content, and see which tags are most important. From here, you can see which tags are most popular, and how to incorporate those tags into your content to get it visible to the most people.
Michael Gray shares those thoughts on tagging when we discussed the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. He pointed out where to find how other users are tagging their items as well as how other users are tagging the items you have also tagged. To best utilize tagging, you need to do your research and find out how people are going to tag the content. In del.icio.us, where spaces are seen as ends of tags, different users could tag the phrase “New York†in a variety of ways, such as “newyork†“new.york†or “new+yorkâ€. Find out how people are tagging and how they are searching, and use those tags. You can then increase the amount of visibility your bookmark will get from these sites.
Neil Patel spoke next on how to best use StumbleUpon for social bookmarking and to benefit from StumbleUpon from a marketing standpoint. His steps are outlined below:
– Install the StumbleUpon toolbar. Seems simple enough, but if you think you can get away without the added “clutter†on your browser, you cannot fully leverage StumbleUpon for your benefit. From this toolbar, you can easily stumble website submitted by other users and vote on them. A thumbs up vote will increase the amount of other people that page is shown to, which increases traffic to the website.
– Add friends. A lot of friends. They can be in your interest group, they can be top users, however you want to do it. But this is called social media, folks, so be social about it.
– Vote on sites on a regular basis. If you are just surfing the web during your lunch break and you see an interesting image or story, stumble it. If it hasn’t been submitted yet you will be able to fill out a submission page for this site. Add a good title, description and popular tags, and the site you were just looking at will be seen by many, many users to drive traffic back to that site.
– Use the “Send To†feature on your toolbar. Here you can send the site you stumbled to your mutual friends. Then, before they can stumble anything else, they need to look at the site you sent to them. This can increase traffic by quite a bit, as long as you keep up your network and have a lot of friends to send it to.
So, with tagging and social bookmarking in the marketing arena, the idea is to save items that other users will find interesting and will hopefully see it and save it themselves. This increases traffic and links to those web pages that have been saved, and if you have enough good, interesting and beneficial content saved on your account, you can be seen as a top user, and then almost everything you save will be seen by many. And if you want to make it relevant to yourself too, go for it.
Editor’s note: For an easy to use tool to add social bookmarking links to your web pages or blog, be sure to check out the social bookmarking tool.Â
