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Social Bookmarking & Tagging Can Help Your Website

February 11, 2007

Marketers and advertisers can benefit by using the numerous “Social Search (Social Networking)” websites now mushrooming all over the Internet — to leverage their products and services.

The First type of social search websites to emerge were those for shared bookmarks. The premise of this idea is to store all favorite links(websites) in one place, accessible from anywhere — and not just a user’s computer only. Consequently, a user can easily share his/her bookmarks with literally everyone on the Internet, or just keep them private as is the case with your “Favorites,” bookmarked on your browser.

Instead of wrestling with folders, social search services(websites) allow you to tag your bookmarks with as many labels as you want — a process similar to grouping your favorites in folders in your computer at home.

If you opt to share your bookmarks publicly, other users can “vote” on them. The higher the number of votes, the higher the chances that more visitors to the social search website will want to view the bookmark(s) — and bookmark them too!

The more bookmarked a resource is, the higher the “Rank” of that resource.

This idea of “sharing” has sky rocketed sites like YouTube [A video Sharing(bookmarking) website] into a top 5 site internet-wide, in terms of user visits — Marketers, politicians, literally everybody is on YouTube — trying to pitch their products and services!

The system of social bookmarking has several advantages over the traditional use of search engines to locate resources on the web, in that Internet resources (websites etc.) are located(bookmarked) and classified(tagged) by human beings, who understand the meaning of the content of the resource(s) unlike search engine spiders, which approximate the meaning of the content of a resource. Ideally, this is far much better than determining the relevance of a resource algorithmically via software, based on metrics like — inbound links and so on.

Social bookmarking should be more efficient than search engine algorithms — Unfortunately this is not the case. Not everyone can for example, tag resources accurately — spell or organize resources properly. Also, some who are always bent on ruining a good thing A.K.A spammers, do flood social sites with “garbage” thus corrupting the process.

Social Networking is affecting online marketing right now and in the coming years. Therefore, a prudent online marketer should incorporate it in his/her marketing strategy, and use it to build a viral “chain of endorsements” pointing to his/her websites from social networks — exposure that will help one build recognition and trust by users accross the web.

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Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Search Engines 

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