What Is Social Bookmarking?

When you find a website or article you like, you save it to your web browser’s bookmarks. Social bookmarking sites allow you to save these links to an online database so you can access them from wherever you are. Additionally, you can tag and share the links to both your own personal network and the Internet at large. Communities develop around certain topics, and these networks become a great source of curated links.

Some of these popular social bookmarking sites share features with social networks like Facebook or Twitter, such as sharing, groups and hashtags. Many of them interface with said social networks, allowing users to share their links with friends.

Popular search engines, like Google, comb through the web with algorithms which try to determine how relevant websites are to what you’re looking for.  The problem with algorithm-based search engines is that they lack a human touch – a real indicator about how relevant links and articles are for a certain topic. Many social bookmarking sites are quite strict on the quality of links submitted, with low quality or irrelevant links quickly removed or ‘downvoted’ until they no longer appear publically on the site.

You can use social bookmarking sites as a useful way to sync bookmarks across your various devices, or as a place for sharing relevant links with different communities of interest.

Social bookmarking sites are useful for any web user who wants to save and share interesting links. Users who will find it particularly useful include:

Researchers interested in sharing academic articles.

Businesses who want to build a brand by distributing articles and content in an easily shareable way.

Users who enjoy using the internet to discover interesting new content to read and watch.

SEO-focused companies interested in improving search engine rankings.

There are numerous popular social bookmarking sites. Here are the four with the highest traffic:

Delicious was the first and most popular social bookmarking site. Users upload their bookmarks and tag them with custom keywords. By clicking on these keywords, users are able to see every tagged link across every user on the network. It’s a great way to see what articles and links are most popular for any given topic.

StumbleUpon is an interesting experience for web users. Rather than showing a list of websites to visit, StumbleUpon embraces the social bookmarking model by giving you a random website based on your interests. If you like it, you give it a thumbs up; if you don’t, you click ‘Stumble’ to visit another. You can submit websites for others to stumble upon, or just embrace the element of randomness. Businesses are able to promote their own content with paid bookmarks.

Digg was an early example of a social news provider, where articles users submitted and bookmarked were aggregated and shown in order of popularity. Digg today has evolved into a more curated experience, but still allows user submission of links and content.

One of the most popular social bookmarking sites today, Reddit is a community based around sharing links in different interest communities called ‘subreddits’. Users either ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ the links based on how relevant or interesting they are to the subreddit. Reddit is often described as ‘the front page of the Internet’ because of just how influential its links are. Reddit is renowned for being able to crash websites due to the sheer amount of traffic directed by its users.