Advantages of Social Bookmarking for SMBs and Hospitality Businesses
Trent Blizzard | 31 July 2006 |
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The “Socialization” of book-marking is an exciting and powerful aspect of Web 2.0. In a nutshell, you can make your bookmarks available to a wider public. You might choose just to share them with yourself (on your home and work computers) or with a group of colleagues or, as is typically the case, with the wider Internet.
Once you start using a social bookmarking service, saving and tagging all of your bookmarks, you will find it much easier to do a quick search for a “tag” and more easily find those few (or dozens or hundreds) of websites you bookmarked - it is a much more effective way to handle hundreds of bookmarks than the “favorite” or “bookmarks” that are built into each browser.
There are three core advantages to social bookmarking (other than the ease of accessing your own bookmarks on a daily basis) for every small business:
- Make your bookmarks available on multiple computers. Access them from any computer hooked up to the internet.
- Share your bookmarks with a group of colleagues and see their bookmarks. This is a good way to collaborate with other people to save important web pages and make them available to others in your organization.
- Share your bookmarks with the wider Internet. Make your favorite websites and web pages available, with comment. This is a good way to promote your own business website to the millions of people that use these sites.
The Potential of Social Bookmarking: Social Bookmarking has powerful potential: it is a way for consumers to “vote” for a site. Del.icio.us, one of the bigger players, gets over 100,000 websites bookmarked a day! If I were a search engine, I would look to capture each of these “votes” as part of my algorithm… if 20 real humans, or 200, or 2,000 “bookmark” your page and tag it as “new york vacation”, chances are that your hotel website is a good NY City Vacation website. We predict that, in the future, the number of people who bookmark (or vote for) your website will play a factor in how well it ranks in search results. Whatever the case, it is true that search engines are indexing the pages within social bookmarking websites; if consumers are bookmarking your website, the search engines know about it now.
Three core advantages to making sure your own website is bookmarked:
- Social Bookmarking websites drive qualified traffic because more and more consumers use them as “trusted” search engines that delivers better results than Google or MSN.
- Social Bookmarking your website will increase your link popularity, because search engines “index” the pages within these sites, and will see the links to your website.
- Social Bookmarking, we predict, will eventually affect your actual rankings in the “organic” search engines as they begin to factor social bookmark scores into the algorithms that generate search results.
Three Favorite Social Bookmarking Websites
- Yahoo MyWeb is a major social bookmarking website. It is my personal favorite, and the one I have been using for several months. It provides a toolbar that makes it easy to bookmark websites as you visit them. You can save it to share with just your contacts, or with “everyone.”
- Del.icio.us is arguably the largest and most powerful social bookmarking website. Users save over 100,000 websites on it per day, and it’s on a fast growth curve. When you signup, you add a little “post” button to your browser, and just click on it when you want to add a website to your account:
- Shadows is another of our favorite bookmarking websites; it’s easy to use and powerful.
Find Out More
Mother of all Social Bookmarking Service Icons
Reviews of Social Bookmark Service
A Directory of Bookmark Managers
Marketers Will Soon Find a Home in Social Bookmark Sites
Introduction to Social Bookmarking
Trent Blizzard - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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August 1st, 2006 at 2:11 pm
Social bookmarking can help you in a ton of ways. This post goes into detail about what it all means….
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August 5th, 2006 at 11:50 am
How Social-Bookmarking can help SMBs…
Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. posted in their online blog-newsletter about the benefits of Web 2.0’s popular service - Social-Bookmarking.
Be sure to read this part: “Three core advantages to making sure your own website is bookmarked”.
R…
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Try out http://www.connectbeam.com
An enterprise grade social bookmarking and collaboration application.
Form private and public workspaces. Complete control over what you share and with whom. View users profile based on their past and present activities.