TopRank started using social bookmarking as an active/passive content promotion method several years ago. In fact, here is a podcast interview I did with Rok Hrastnik in March 2005 discussing SEO, tagging and bookmarking. We’ve also been fairly successful at promoting a social bookmarking tool for blogs over the past 18 months or so, gathering 50,000+ links.
Leveraging the social behaviors and technology of social news and bookmarking sites can be very effective as an active content promotion strategy.
For web sites with abundant content, adding such bookmark invitations to web pages and other media can form a productive passive bookmarking strategy by leveraging the volume of traffic and points of contact. The momentum of thousands of web pages on the web, each with an invitation to save and share, can drive traffic and links 24/7.
For more aggressive online marketers, waiting for visitors to find your content and then decide to bookmark isn’t enough. Building up profiles and networks of friends to introduce and share content with can drive great traffic that folds well with an active bookmarking strategy. Creating content and then purposefully sharing and promoting it with likeminded networks provides value to the community and also enhances content distribution.
However, with so many different bookmarking services it can be a pain to manage with spreadsheets and browser based favorites. Here are a few services that make the chore of social bookmark submissions a lot easier.
SocialPoster.com, provides a bookmarklet that makes it very easy to submit social news and bookmark submissions to a variety of services. You can segment them by the most popular services, by industry or just focus on Pligg powered sites. You can also use a frames option that makes it very handy and even quicker while still making each submission unique.
The folks at Squareoak have recently launched a similar service called Post Toaster that provides a simple, one page interface to a variety of social bookmarking services. You can sort here as well by services that bookmark, news and those that “do follow”. A good thing to know for SEO purposes.
Here are a few additional social bookmark tools and resources worth mentioning:
- Social Marker is a basic tool for 31 services
- 3spots offers a huge list of social bookmarking tools
- Robin Good offers a great explanation of where social bookmarking falls in the context of web content organization, which can be very useful knowledge for marketing
- Introduction to Social Bookmarking (My SES NYC 2007 presentation)
- Social Bookmarking and SEO (One of my DMA07 presentations during a post conference seminar with Joseph Jaffee on social media)
What social bookmarking tools to you use? Please share in the comments.
