Crowd Surfing
(Written by guest contributor Jon Carroll)
Social bookmarking is one of the hottest trends in social networking. It is a great way to make more contacts with people, and content that makes the front page of social bookmarking sites can be a windfall of traffic for your site.
Social bookmarking allows Internet users to collectively store, organize, search, and manage links to web content. Social bookmarking was started around 1996, but all of the social bookmarking sites of that time failed when the dot-com bubble burst because of a lack of a viable way to make income. Social bookmarking was far from dead though; it was just a technology that was ahead of its time. Shortly after 2004, social bookmarking websites started to spring up all over the Internet and to everyone’s surprise, they were very successful. Today there are dozens of social bookmarking and news websites that receive millions of visitors a day, driving most of that traffic towards the bookmarked sites. The amount of traffic pushed at the bookmarked content is enough to make any Internet marketer drool and to drive a server administrator to tears. It is fairly common for bookmarks that make it to the front page of the social news website digg.com to crash the web server hosting the content if the server isn’t properly set up for the sudden influx of thousands of visitors a minute.
Here’s how it works: If there is a link you would like to remember, you can add it to a social bookmarking system. The bookmark can usually be set as public, private, or selectively available to certain other users of the system. Bookmarks added to social bookmarking systems can usually be viewed chronologically, by category, tags, friend bookmarks, search engine, or popularity. Some of the more modern social bookmarking systems allow users to leave comments on the bookmarks, share bookmarks with friends on social networks, and rate bookmarks. A more time-sensitive variant of social bookmarking, called social news, focuses specifically on bookmarks getting a certain number of votes in a short time period, creating a popular content feed that is completely user-controlled. Sites like Digg, reddit, and Newsvine are examples of social news websites.
The best thing about social bookmarking is that the users get to do most of the work. The only tricky part is making it easy for the user to add your content to social news and bookmarking systems. Adding buttons to submit your content to the most popular social bookmarking and news sites is fairly easy to do, and could result in a huge return. By having links on the same page as your content, you make it a lot easier for the user to submit your content to their favorite social bookmarking or news site. There are a number of scripts for generating links to popular social news and bookmarking websites; see the list below for details.
One way that using social bookmarking benefits you is that it keeps you abreast of what is currently being read online. You will know what is hot – or viral – on the Internet at any given moment in time, which will help you in turn to create viral content. Social bookmarking can also add a level to the way in which you network with your friends and contacts on the Internet. Sites like Digg allow you to connect to your Facebook account and see what links your friends are currently Digging. And if you turn out to have a knack for recommending sites, people may keep up with you just to see what you’re currently reading. And then there is the holy grail of social bookmarking: getting your site to the front page of a prominent social bookmarking site. This phenomenon is a much-desired, elusive thing, but it can greatly increase your ranking with the search engines. Here are a few things you can do to up your chances of this happening:
Social Bookmarking Dos:
– Do use a headline that is catchy and descriptive at the same time.
– Do get your friends to bookmark your content.
– Do time your post so that it’s applicable to the moment. If a bunch of people bookmark in a short amount of time, that’s better than if they do it over time.
– Do make it easy for people by installing buttons on your site.
– Do make connections with other users who have similar interests to you on social bookmarking and news sites; they will be more likely to rate and view your bookmarks.
Social Bookmarking Don’ts:
– Don’t submit your own content to social news websites, let your users do it. Most social bookmarking or news systems have things in place to evaluate the quality of a user’s submissions. If you are constantly submitting content from your own site, it could make your account look like a spammer.
– Don’t try to abuse systems with ratings on bookmarks by creating multiple accounts to give your content ratings. Ratings are generally tracked by IP address to prevent this, and even if you do it from different addresses, there are systems in place to detect different accounts always rating the same bookmarks.
– Don’t ignore etiquette. Companies and organizations on social bookmarking sites have the image of an outsider, or a third party. Businesses are not in tune with the community surrounding social bookmarking sites and can alienate other users of the site with incessant company news (seen as spam by other users). In order to function within the social bookmarking community, entrepreneurs need to follow social bookmarking etiquette–contribute, be honest, get involved.
Resources of easy scripts to add social bookmarking buttons to your content:
http://www.wolf-howl.com/tools/social-bookmark-script-widget/
This has Javascript to add to any page to generate social bookmarking links. Full source code is provided, so it can be customized to fit your needs.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-bookmarks/
This is a simple WordPress plugin for easily adding social bookmarking links to the end of all your blog posts.
http://www.addtobookmarks.com/
This has Javascript to add social bookmarking links to any page. It includes an explanation of social bookmarking when hovering over the links.
Social Bookmarking Sites:
Alexa Rank: 150
~30,000,000 visits a month
Description: Digg is a social news website for sharing content from anywhere on the Internet. Links to content are submitted for voting and commenting on by the Digg users. Links with the most votes make it to the front page, which usually causes tons of traffic to be directed at the site. In order to make it to the front page, a story usually has to get enough votes within 48 hours of the link being submitted, making the content very time sensitive.
Alexa Rank: 641
~5,000,000 visits a month
Description: Reddit is a social news website that allows users to post links to content anywhere on the Internet. Users get to vote links up or down to show their support or dislike for a link. The links with the most votes become more prominent on the main page. Reddit uses a karma system that rewards users who frequently submit links that get lots of positive votes, and punishes users who frequently submit links that get negative votes.
Alexa Rank: 690
~4,000,000 visits a month
Description: Delicious is a social bookmarking site for sharing links to all kinds of content. Unlike the other social news websites in this list, links submitted to Delicious aren’t as time sensitive. Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with index terms. The site can be searched for index terms to find links related to a similar topic or links submitted by like-minded users.
Alexa Rank: 3,046
~2,00,000 visits a month
Description: Fark.com is a community website that allows users to submit links which are then reviewed by an editorial team and a select few are picked to appear on the main page each day. Links can be viewed and commented on via the website. The site receives about 2,000 story submissions per day, and about 50 of them are displayed on the site.
Alexa Rank: 4,025
~1,200,000 visits a month
Description: Newsvine is a community-powered news website that draws content from its users and from mainstream sources. Users can write articles, post links to external articles, and discuss stories on the site.
