Social bookmarking, the power of the share button
Social bookmarking is one of the trends that has emerged over the last few years. It is in Internet terms very old, but yet many people don't really understand what it does and how it can help them. This article gives a brief overview of social bookmarking and how it can help business.
Visitors to websites like to share things, things which they have come across which they think may be valuable to others. This makes sense becuase the vast number of web pages out there makes it difficult to always find quality resources.
This is where social bookmarking comes into play. Say Bob finds a web page which he thinks is particularly useful. He can save it to his favourites. But a more useful thing is to save it as a bookmark that other people can see. Other people that may find that web page beneficial. This is what social bookmarking is all about.
Bob uploads the address of the web page to a social bookmarking tool. Other people from around the world using the social bookmarking tool can see the link, use it and then rate it. Everytime it is rated it is given a score by the social bookmarking tool. The higher the score, the higher up the listings it appears on the social bookmarking tool.
Great in an ideal world you might say! But who actually uses social bookmarking tools? The answer...millions of people! Millions of people that come across a good web page will submit it to a social bookmarking tool such as Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit.
And pages that are popular within Digg and co get lots of traffic. So much traffic in fact that there was actually a term floating around the Internet a while ago called the 'Digg Effect'. The moral of the story was if you were submitting to Digg, make sure you were hosted on a decent server as the sheer volume of traffic from Digg could overwhelm poorer servers.
So if you have something on your website that you think other people may find useful, offer them a way to submit it to a social bookmarking tool. How do you do this? Simply include a share button on the bottom of your web page. A share button allows a visitor to submit the web page to a multitude of social bookmarking tools. You can see an example of one of these at the bottom of this page.
To get your own share button, go to www.addthis.com/bookmark.php and simply copy and paste the HTML code they give you into your web page.
