Social Network Marketing

The introduction of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace has resulted in an ever-growing marketing capability as well as social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Delicious and YouTube.  The main benefit of using such sites is that it is totally free and involves huge amounts of traffic.  It is possible for your offer to 'go viral' as more and more visitors are reached via these mediums.

The drawback of using these sites is that it is very competitive and it is difficult to get your point across because of the mass of traffic. There is also the danger that your offer might be considered spam; the best way to avoid this is to ensure that you provide quality content and maintain your reputation as an authority on that subject.  It is worthwhile tapping into this marketing vehicle as the volumes of traffic generated are huge.

Social bookmarking came about because people were adding their sites to link or open directories, but who wants to sift through a link directory?  So, sites like Delicious emerged in 2003 and the community were now able to add their sites and then sort them into those that are popular and those that are not.  It is called bookmarking because it was designed for users to keep a list of their favourite sites online for them to access when they want. 

 Now sites like Digg are in the top 1,000 sites visited and its user base is continually growing.  The difference with Digg is that you can add more than one link to the directory from the same account.

But do you really want tens of thousands of people visiting your site just because it has appeared on a social book marking site?  You want visitors to stop and browse and actually buy from your site, not just to visit because they are nosey and want to see your site.  But it means that others are linking to your site, and that means that you get indexed with the search engines far quicker.  So it is about the number of links you have, but it is far better to have quality links to your site, ie, those that are relevant and have a high page rank.

But what about dofollow and nofollow tags?  Now a nofollow command was designed by Google to stop spam from getting huge amounts of backlinks to their sites.  So backlinks containing the nofollow command will not help increase the site’s page rank.  But nofollow backlinks are not useless because Yahoo follows nofollow links, although this statement is up for debate.  It is possible to see what backlinks you are getting to your site using the link domain command.  Simply type in “linkdomain:http:yoursite.com” (take out the apostrophes and replace ‘yoursite.com’ with your domain name).  It is so important that you don’t oversubmit to the social bookmarking sites, because you will be considered as spam, and you will be banned. It is far better to submit to only a few, say three, bookmarking sites, because it is best to concentrate your efforts rather than sprinkle over a vast range.

When social bookmarking your sites you want to adhere to the rules for submitting quality content; don’t let this rule slide because you will be considered spam and you will be banned.  The layout of your web page is also very important here.  We know that you are trying to sell a product, but don’t make this overly obvious.  Create a relevant title and provide useful, relevant content that doesn’t appear to be a hard sell.  When it comes to including your keywords within your content, you won’t be able to include anchor text in your link, but you can include the keyword within the title of your submission, in the description of the site and in the custom tags section so you will still be building keyword authority.

You can use an automated social bookmarking posting service and it is up to you  which one you choose, but I prefer to manually submit to the social bookmarking sites because I am not submitting masses of entries.

One drawback of social bookmarking is that it is up to the person saving the link to assign relevant tags to the data and poor tagging can mean that data isn’t always accessible from a place that it should be.

I hope that this has clarified social bookmarking somewhat for you.  Happy social bookmarking.