Are you using social bookmarking sites? About 84% of marketers targeting other businesses do! The great benefit to social bookmarking is that it allows users to enter links and images to their own content into the social sphere, which can help to increase online visibility. If you are not yet engaged with a social bookmarking site, then here are some tips to get you started.
- Review a list of top bookmarking sites.
- Choose several top bookmarking sites to engage with.
- Target your messages on the top bookmarking sites.
The first step is to take stock of the social networking scene. Which sites are most popular? Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Digg, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious are all some of the big names today. Did you know that there are 58 million tweets each day, and more than 2.1 billion Twitter searches every day? Once you have a list, learn more about each site. Is your target demographic a regular user of this particular site? What about your competition? This bookmarking sites list will help you to get a broad idea of where you might want to target your efforts.
Approximately 50% of companies have successfully found new customers via social media, and doing the same should be one of your goals. In order to do that, you should make your company profile as complete as it can be, and make sure that it links back to your website. One great advantage to social bookmarking is that you only need reach a few people in order to reach many more. Links, pictures, and content get shared at exponential rates, creating great brand visibility if the content is of a high quality. You can bookmark sites that are important to your industry, or sites which shine a spotlight on the accomplishments of your own company.
When you begin to use the social bookmarking and networking sites, it is important to learn the ins and outs of how people generally communicate there. For example, on Twitter, each day of the week tends to have its own special hashtag trend. On Tuesday, the trend is “TransformationTuesday.” Your organization needs to learn how to ride the waves of these trends and preferred modes of connection. If all your organization does is spam the network with repetitive or uninteresting content, you will quickly find that no amount of time spent on that network will provide any marketing benefit.
Do not forget to add the social media buttons to your website so that visitors know where to find you on those networks. Spend a little time to learn which networks are a good fit with your organization, and how to talk with the users there and not just at them. On social media, your worth is only as great as the value that other people and organizations attribute to your content and contributions.