What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a technique where visitors to a website are invited to bookmark the website so that they can visit it in the future. The bookmarks are available to anyone that visits the website and the bookmarks are stored on their browser in most cases. However, in some cases, social bookmarking can take a private nature where people who fulfill some eligibility can be allowed to add the website to their bookmarks. The bookmarking is done through metadata.
The prime intention here is to create repeat as well as new visitors. When people add these bookmarks (in the form of tags), they become visible to a large number of people within the network who might also want to check out the website. Some social bookmarking sites are Digg, Stumble Upon, Propeller, Reddit, Mister Wong and Mixx. Deli.cio.us was the site that not only coined the term 'social bookmarking', but also was the first to introduce the concept of tagging.
What are the Pros of Social Bookmarking?
They increase the chances of getting repeat customers. On many occasions, people visit some interesting website and make a mental note to check it later in detail, but then they forget what the name of the site was. Social bookmarking can avoid such issues.
There is also an SEO aspect here. When people bookmark sites, the number of visits that the site gets will increase. This will help improve the page rank of the websites.
Modern bookmarking abilities allow people to add comments to the bookmarks and even email them to their friends. This has made them much more beneficial for marketing purposes.
What are the Cons of Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking suffers from the fact that it uses tags. Tags do not follow any standard rules and hence it is possible that they may be used wrongly. Tags used ambiguously also have no impact on the marketing campaign.
Spamming is a growing area under social bookmarking. Taking advantage of the fact that social bookmarking can improve SEO of a site, some marketers have started bookmarking their websites many times using many popular tags. This is proving to be the bane of this technique.
