How Not to Use Social Bookmarks

Social Media Marketing

I have seen a lot of articles lately on the relatively knew phenomenon known as SMO (“Social Media Optimisation” ) and SMM (“Social Media Marketing”). This process involves creating an enticing piece of content (the “bait” or “hook”) and creating an environment where the bait will be spread through Social Media Networks. If you don’t know what social media networks are, please read this post.

Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarks are one type of social media network. Instead of adding your bookmarks to your browser bookmarks and storing them on one computer, you can store them on a social bookmarks server, so that when you change computers you bookmarks are still accessible by logging into the site. Most social bookmarking networks also allow other people to see you social bookmarks and rank them. The highest ranking bookmarks will appear on the front page of a website for all to see, meaning a large amount of traffic to a web site from the social network.

The Problem…

Remember the “add to bookmarks” button of the 90’s? They’re back in social bookmark form, and once again users of these tags aren’t considering the network behaviors of their users. There are a large number of sites that allow you create a piece of code to insert into your page to allow people to “Add to ”. Here is one example -http://www.evilgeniusmarketing.com/ice/tag-generator.cfm

The snippets appear on the page, people click on them and are redirected to their social bookmark site of choice. This is fine, but it is far from being optimal. Take for example the social bookmarks site Digg. Digg allows users to create a story (which is a social bookmark that others can see) which appears in a directory style page with other “Diggs”. Users who subscribe to dig can then vote for a story (“Digg it”) or against a story (“Bury it”), making the story move up or down in the position on the page. The strongest stories end up on the front page, creating a lot of exposure, visits and organic one way links for the owner of the site. So why is there a problem to creating social bookmark tags for your website so people will Digg it?

The answer is that if 1000 people visit your site and (hypothetically) all 1000 click your “Add to Digg” button, you will have 1000 different postings of the same story. Users of Digg know from experience that duplicate stories can get buried in (literally) minutes, and if you have 1000 of them chances are 99.9% of them will get buried. Additionally, as there is no indication of which story you want users to vote for, the story you might want people to vote for will also be considered a duplicate and get buried. This is the worst possible situation and is counter-productive to your Social Media Marketing efforts.

The Solution

What you really want to do is have those 1000 people vote for you story on Digg. This would make a single story stronger and move it closer to the front page meaning you are more likely to survive the “burys” of other Digg users and end up on the front page. What you need to do is go into Digg (or whatever social bookmarks network you want to promote for) and create a new story. Click on the “comments” section of your story – this is the URL you want to send your users to. The reason for this is that if you simply send your users to Digg, they will end up on the front page, where there is a significant chance they may not find your story. By linking to the “comments” for your story, you are giving them a location just for your Digg story, so they will know which one to vote for – there is a “Digg it” button in the comments section of each story. Aside from this, they can also add their comments, which they may not have done if you have directed them from a blog, so it creates user participation – it will also help them associate the Digg to your account and increase the chance of them looking at your other Diggs. More to the point, all of your Digg votes will strengthen just one story, which is the best possible situation. You can simply make a hyperlink like this.

 Digg isn’t the only network where this concept applies. If you’re going to use this method to promote your web site or multimedia, please think it through. At the least, try your own buttons to make sure what you’re doing makes sense to you and your users.