When blogs came out and got popular, rarely did any internet marketer yearn to start a career as a “Professional Blogger” but many looked at how to use the blogging technology to improve their overall web presence.
The same thing is true with social bookmarking. A lot of people jumped headfirst into the tag and ping thing, without really knowing – or needing to know – why social bookmarks are such the rage.
What Is Social Bookmarking?
Everyone knows the ‘favorites’ or ‘bookmarks’ in the IE or Firefox browser. You find a site you want to save the URL, so you click “Add To Favorites” or “Bookmark This Site” and you are able to come back to it whenever you want.
This is known as “Bookmarking”.
So, add the word “Social” ahead of it, and you have the same functionality, with two differences:
a. The bookmark is no longer IN your browser, it’s ON a website.
b. The bookmark is no longer private, it’s public.
The most common question at this point is, “ok, but why do people use it? I just do not get why”.
The first easy answer is, people like sharing.
But to make this clearer here are a bunch of scenarios to show some benefits that social bookmarking offers, which cannot really be achieved in any other simple, generic way (and this ‘simple’ and ‘generic’ point is important).
Ok, lets say you are a dog lover, and you are always finding cool, funny, interesting, helpful sites about dogs.You want to share them with all your dog loving friends. Instead of forwarding the URLs by email all the time, clogging people’s email boxes, you just stick it up on your Delicious account, and anyone who knows that you always find cool dog sites, can go to your page on Delicious and see all your posts.
Also you can see which other people on delicious have also bookmarked the same URLs as you, so you can click on their name, and see what else they’ve bookmarked. You can find new URLs this way, which you would not have found otherwise.
Also, imagine one day you are at a friend’s house, you bring your dog over to play with your friend’s dog. And your friend mentions that his dog has some medical issue, and you say “Oh, I just bookmarked an important article on that medical issue!” So you immediately fire up your Delicious account, and give your friend that URL.
So this is one group of scenarios where you, as a dog lover, can benefit from having a Delicious account.
This could be a reason why your visitors will start to be attracted to your tag sites.
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