What Is Social Bookmarking And Why Is It Great For My Business?
With almost two billion websites on the internet, it’s no easy feat to make yours stand out. We’re sure that you’ve consulted top website design & development companies in Kuwait, and implemented a myriad of marketing and promotional techniques to drive website traffic. And there’s no doubt you must have utilized extensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to secure a higher rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If not, feel free to check out any of our several articles catered towards SEO in Kuwait.
However, today we will discuss another social media marketing tool called social bookmarking. As the name indicates, bookmarking is the process of saving a web page on your browser to access at your convenience. Social bookmarking then, allows you to save specific pages (like articles and other resources) to a social bookmarking platform, which you can revisit at a later time, online, and from any device. In fact, this concept might even go a little bit beyond bookmarking since it lets users keep track of your content.
Have you ever sent a website link to a friend or a family member? That is also social bookmarking. These bookmarks help people search, gather, and organize content that they find interesting. Additionally, users can choose to comment and vote for pages that they like, making it easier to point out valuable links. Social bookmarking sites have now expanded into dynamic and diverse online communities, where users can not only discuss these links but also build sub-groups in specific threads or rooms based on shared personal interests.
You might be wondering that this sounds like a pretty convenient tool to access your favorite web pages, but how exactly does this feature drive business growth? How can social bookmarking be used in conjunction with Kuwait’s digital marketing services?
Social bookmarking sites simplify the process of creating brand awareness and increasing traffic. Because these platforms are great places for finding curated content, submitting your content on one or more of these sites can help you build your authority on social media. What’s more, they also improve your website’s search and keyword rankings. Let’s list some of the ways you can benefit from social bookmarking:
1. Content Creation
Needless to say, the foundation of every marketing technique lies in the curation of content. If you want people to look up to your brand for resources and expertise, you can use a social bookmarking site to save online resources to share with your audience. It only saves you time but also lets you schedule content ahead of time.
Another aspect of creating content is organizing it. It’s best to use a site where you can avoid losing valuable content by keeping it organized. Most of these sites let you “tag” (label) content. So whenever you need to go back to the content, you can just look up the label under which you’ve categorized it. There you have it, resources that are organized and readily available!
Finally, be sure to mix up your content. There should be a healthy variety of self-promotion and content that is not branded.
2. Faster Indexing
Search engines are constantly gathering information on every website on the internet, so that they can rank them. They collect all the data they need by crawling for information and indexing it (which is when Google updates and stores all data). Social bookmarking speeds up and enhances this entire indexing process. It helps Google bots find and understand your content more easily, and consequently, your content is ranked faster.
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are generated when your content appears on a bookmarking site. These links lead back to the original website and are high-quality. It’s important to acquire legitimate backlinks if you want to get yourself to the first page on search engines. When using social bookmarking as a link building strategy, it’s ideal to also add other resources apart from your own website pages, just like you would normally use such a site. It’s not effective when used alone but works great when used in combination with other strategies.
4. Traffic
The more people bookmark your posts, the more likely they are to show up in searches, and ultimately lead to free and organic traffic to your website. To make it easy for people to bookmark your content, try adding bookmarking buttons to your blogs and articles, making bookmarking for readers as easy as a click of a button. Remember, regular bookmarks that are set on browsers will not affect your traffic. This feature is exclusive to social media bookmarking.
5. Business Opportunities & Relationships
The highly organized structures of these social bookmarking platforms makes it really convenient to identify market gaps and the ways in which you can fill them. Moreover, you might be able to tap into a whole new clientele and expand your customer base. It’s a great way to show your target audience that you are active when it comes to building and maintaining online communities.
Let’s share some of the best and most popular social bookmarking tools used today:
- Twitter - Though not usually associated with social bookmarking, posting links, images, and other content with your Twitter account is an excellent way to bookmark them. A lot of people use the “like” button to be able to bookmark certain tweets and go back to them in the future.
- Pinterest - Pinterest has about 70 million users, majority of whom are women (80%). Studies cite that around half of its users consult this popular platform before making a buying decision. Helpful for those into visual content, Pinterest has powerful search features and makes it easy to share pins on other social media platforms.
- Pocket - With Pocket you can bookmark almost anything from your browser as well as other web applications. This one’s easy to use for beginners and has offline viewing capabilities.
- Reddit - This popular social news site can also be used as a social bookmarking tool. Its voting feature allows good content to be pushed to the top, which you can save to your profile. This platform boasts much richer community engagement and a host of extra features like activity tabs and awards.
- Digg - This news aggregator is most popular for content related to tech, politics, science, and entertainment. It has a pretty good interface. It used to be like Reddit, in the sense that the front page was curated by app users, but now this job is taken over by its editors. Which is why, if your contest ends up on the front page, you are bound to get tons of traffic.
By no means is this an exhaustive list. There are other popular social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Dribble, We Heart It, Mix, FlipBoard, Bitly, and many more. So feel free to pick a few that best match your business goals and brand identity.
Design Master, one of the best internet marketing agencies, can help you outline these goals as well as achieve them. Now that you know what social bookmarking is and how it benefits your SEO efforts, let our professional SEO developers and web designers in Kuwait help you drive traffic back and forth between your website and social media.
Contact us today to get started.