Everyone’s talking about it. And as I write this, someone is thinking of starting a new social bookmarking site too. Social bookmarking seems to be on all powerpoint presentations, on all boards, discussions and forums, as it’s the strategy in Social Media Marketing. Mister Wong, Digg, Furl, Delicious, Blink, and what not? There’s quite a lot of them.
Now, take a step back and think..how many of them do you really use? Probably one or maximum two. And I’m sure many of us use the most popular ones like Digg and Delicious. You may have tested others but I seriously doubt if anyone is using all of them.
So the question here – Is Social bookmarking as popular as you think it is? Does it justify the hype it is associated with?
Yes and No.
Yes because, it is a new thing and the rate at which people are using it is awesome! We used the browser bookmarks earlier, not any more. It has become a habit now, and I don’t think we’ll ever go back but have more of it.
No because, many of us still don’t use it. And even more of us really haven’t heard about some of them.
But the hype still remains. It’s the new “mantra” according to the gurus. Social media marketing is the key to your online success, they say.
From the SEO perspective, social bookmarking has no effect on your website excluding the fact that it will give you some attention and traffic.
It has no effect on your page rank or your site’s authority. It may give you extra traffic if you are liked by the “Diggers” and if it goes just a bit too popular, it may even crash your site too.
So in my opinion, social bookmarking is not popular as we think (or told) it is. Having said that, it has a huge potential and as new social bookmarking sites come in, there should be new features available and more and more users will get used to it.
Please let me know your thoughts on it.
I don't use social bookmarking near as much as I should. I guess you could call me lazy. I originally started out using social bookmarks but feel that it is seriously diluted now considering that everyone and their uncle is using it and submits posts regularly.
Truth be told, most of the time I will get a few "hits" a day from a submitted post but it just doesn't seem worth the amount of time it takes to submit. Help! I can't see the forest from the trees!
I guess if I kept at it, it would eventually pay off but I have found other forms of traffic generation far better and less of a hassle….
The key to being successful with social bookmarking is to really engross yourself into the community. Become an authority figure and make friends. Then you can really harness the "networking" part of social networking.
I've actually seen most of my traffic coming from Digg, StumbleUpon, and Thoof. I've just started my blog this year and I haven't tapped in to the networking part yet. I imagine that will increase my traffic even more.
I also think it matters what your blog is about. Most social networks are looking for "something fun". I wouldn't think that making money blogs would do as well.