5 tips for using social bookmarking for business

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool for organising and sharing your personal links, but it’s also a great way of increasing traffic to your website and interest in your brand. Using social bookmarking for business builds a network of backlinks to your site and drives traffic – giving you a new, highly engaged user base that will share your brand in strongly content-driven communities. . Previously on Hello Social we explored what social bookmarking is and the best websites for getting started on it. This blog post will tell you how to use social bookmarking for business; engaging users and bringing them to your site.

Popular social bookmarking sites are a great way to spread your brand message. Unlike the informational free-for-all of Facebook and Twitter, sites like Reddit and Delicious are made up of smaller communities of interest that are much more likely to share interesting and engaging content. The core idea is pretty simple: create lots of backlinks to your site; which will both bring new users to your content and boost your search engine rankings. Here are five tips for making the most of social bookmarking for business:

You won’t get far with social bookmarking if the content you create isn’t interesting. Users on sites like Reddit are likely to only share links they find interesting, useful or amusing. Consider maintaining a blog with interesting and relevant posts. This is a solid piece of SEO advice generally – Google and similar search engines are all about great content for the end user, something you should always strive to provide.

Great content is much more important when you’re talking about communities of interest who are focused mostly on interesting and insightful links. Make sure you’re creating stuff people want to share!

Social bookmarking is only effective when you’re posting links in the right place. For example, users on Reddit tend to appreciate unserious, interesting and playful links. If you’re a legal firm, maybe Reddit isn’t your ideal platform. Conversely, Delicious is a very popular platform for informational bookmarks, and users are fond of building and sharing collections of great, explanatory links. If you’re posting blogs or content with that focus, maybe Delicious is for you.

An important thing to remember is that social bookmarking sites are not like search engines – they are made up of users with different interests. Keep the community in mind when you’re selecting social bookmarking sites to use.

The most important thing about using social bookmarking for business is tagging your content properly, so the right users see it. Each social bookmarking community has its own ‘folksonomy’ – particular way of tagging – and understanding these is crucial for making sure your content reaches the right users. For example, on Delicious, the most popular tags include things like technology and long reads, whereas on Reddit the most consistently popular subreddits are r/funny and r/news. Using social bookmarking for business means understanding what tags get the most exposure, and which will be most relevant to your brand.

Users can smell a bad marketing pitch from a mile away. If you overload a social bookmarking site with low-quality links, your brand will suffer for it. On Reddit, users are particularly wary of direct marketing efforts, and will usually downvote these links until they are no longer seen on the website. It’s important to be organic when using social bookmarking for business – create worthwhile content that users will actually want to read and share, rather than obvious attempts to sell them something. Be creative!

Additionally: don’t post your content repeatedly and to different tags and subreddits. This isn’t Twitter! Users won’t appreciate you cluttering up their link feeds with your content – even if it’s great.

Even with great content and strong community interest, sometimes you need an extra push. Some social bookmarking sites offer paid spots, which promote your links over unpaid content. For example, StumbleUpon offers ‘paid discovery’ which take some of the randomness out of the browsing experience and directs interested users to your page for a per-click cost. Reddit also allows for sponsored posts to appear at the top of the page, in a designated advertising section. Social bookmarking for business is a great way to build up free, shared backlinks, but paid links are a great way to broaden your marketing strategy.

The purpose of social bookmarking for business is to expand your brand reach. You’ll find that if your content is engaging and interesting, you won’t need to share the content yourself. Much like social media, social bookmarking sites thrive off user sharing – so might find your reach expanding organically as users consume and share your links for you.