Twitter. It’s not just for making pithy jokes or chronicling every episode of Game of Thrones. Twitter’s “re-tweet” function allows you to keep track of your favorite links, articles, videos, and pictures. With a user-base that is more than 300 million strong, it also provides an excellent branding platform for your business. [1] X Research source Reddit. Reddit’s structure of sub-reddits (or sub-categories) takes tagged key words and turns them into on-line forums. Here, you can post links in the key word’s corresponding sub-reddit and get up votes by community members. The web site design is very bare bones and sometimes clunky to navigate, but if you just need a place to find links based on common interests, this should fit the bill. Pinterest. Are you driven by images? Then Pinterest is the place for you. Here you can “pin” links for just about anything – new recipes, exercise tips, tech articles, wedding inspiration, etc. Although Pinterest might appear to be exclusively for women, more than 1/3 of its users are men. [2] X Research source StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a website purely designed for liking and share links. When you register an account with them, you can choose general areas of interest, and then the web site will present different links for you to “stumble upon” and read. Delicious. The grand dame of social bookmarking, Delicious is currently undergoing a reboot to make it easier to integrate links across social media platforms. Because Delicious has had such a long-standing presence in the social bookmarking scene, many users are still loyal to it.
To copy, right-click on the link’s address in your browser. Select the “copy” option from the menu of options that will appear. Then, return to your social bookmarking site and right-click again; select the “paste” option this time. This will put the link into the forum where you can upload a link. You will then need to hit an “upload” or “post” button on the site. Consult the tutorial section of the social bookmarking site if you have questions about how to upload content to it.
Offer discounts and special user codes through social bookmarking sites to drive traffic to your web site. Upload the link for the page on your web site or blog that you want to readers to visit one of these social bookmarking sites. [4] X Research source Use popular keywords to tag your links. Often, social bookmarking sites will tell you which keywords are “trending” (as on Twitter) or what word is a particularly popular search at that moment. Consider how you can tag your business’s account with popular keywords. This will help drive more traffic to your site. Amass followers by being active on these sites. Retweet or pin items that you find to be popular from other users. If you are an active user on the site, then more activity will come to your own account. If you think of social bookmarking sites as a helpful PR tool, then you can use them to raise awareness about your product to your target audience.
Remember that it is in your business’s interest to be a trustworthy and valuable member of the community.
Not only will this help you make valuable connections, it will also give your potential customers a better sense of who you are and what drives your business.
Remember that tags and keys words are there to help connect users, not divide them.
Today, social bookmarking is much more interactive than when it first began, with digital communities like Digg, Reddit, Pinterest and Twitter providing millions of users a space to share common interests, bounce ideas off of each other, and gain inspiration from the community. [5] X Research source
