Social Bookmarking Tips For Newbies

The world of social media is varied and  immense. There is basically no single style of social media platform; instead there are many different types which offer the user and the marketer many different options.

In this article we are going to explore 3 of the more popular social bookmarking platforms - Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon. There are many variations of these out there including Reddit, Chime.in and Diigo; but these are the originals and you should always start from the beginning.

From a social media marketing perspective, these platforms are known to be more passive in that they don't require as much time as others such as Twitter or Facebook.

Delicious- is one of the original social bookmarking platforms and is still among the most popular ones on the web. It let users to store, share and discover internet bookmarks with their friends and the public.

When first signing into Delicious you're prompted to set up your user profile, including your bio and website. Then you will get to save your links and categorize them by self-determined themes into 'stacks', adding comments and inviting your friends and colleagues to contribute their own links to your postings as well. Your stacks can either be private or in the public Delicious domain to share with your friends. Once in the public domain, others users can discover your posts, read your comments, share, save and visit your urls. It's a great way to create online brand awareness for your company and to drive traffic to your blog. You can also discover other people's stacks and make comments on them, adding to the sense of community and increasing your reputation and visibility.

Digg is a powerful social news website that allows people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. When a 'digger' finds a page they like, they submit it to Digg (called digging) and others can vote on it (thumbs down or thumbs up). The ranking on the site depends on how many good or bad votes it receives from the website's users. The content is categorized into major themes such as Sports, Careers, Entertainment and Technology.

Digg is a great platform if you have a blog or an informational type of website. If you are promoting a storefront or an  e-commerce site it probably shouldn't be too much of a problem for you. Although by submitting your site or posts, you may get more traffic and potentially more customers which is what you're after in the first place.

StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that suggests sites for users to stumble onto. The websites will be chosen based on your pre-selected interests as well as the feedback of the people you follow and your previous likes. When you sign up for the site, StumbleUpon normally installs a toolbar on your browser that allows you to 'stumble' through its directory of blogs. They also add thumbs up and thumbs down buttons so that you can rate the pages, photos, and videos that you stumble upon. Your ratings will help to push the site higher or lower in the overall index and impact its likelihood of being chosen for visitors. It's a great way to discover parts of the internet that you didn't previously know about. It also saves the sites that you've 'liked' so that you can re-visit them in the future.

Whenever I create a new website or page, I normally add it to the StumbleUpon index by visiting it giving it the thumbs up with the button on the toolbar. It's a great way of driving traffic to your site, which in turn may also create future customers for your business.