Marketing and Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking refers to sites that allow their users to store, categorize and share content. By participating in these communities you can let others know about your website content. If it's quality content others will bookmark it, digg it, blink it... or whatever else it is they do to show their interest.
Using social bookmarking as a marketing tool
Enabling and encouraging your visitors to share your content is a powerful way to get your name out. Even IBM is placing social bookmarking links on their pages.
How to use social bookmarking as a marketing tool:
- Create content that people want to share
- Make it easy for them to share the content
Top social bookmarking sites
Social Bookmarking in a news format: 1. Digg.com - ~10 million per month 2. Propeller.com - ~5 million per month 3. Reddit.com - around ~1 million per month
Social Bookmarking in a "bookmarking" format: 1. del.icio.us - around ~1 million per month 2. Blinklist.com - ~250K per month 3. Furl.net - ~100K per month
Social Bookmarking in a different format: 1. StumbleUpon.com - around ~5 million per month
How to link your content to social bookmarking sites
We use AddThis. It's that button at the top of this page that says "+Bookmark". If you hover over the AddThis button you will see a list of ways you can share this page. This list can be customized, which is what we did to include the features we think are most valuable for our content.
Our AddThis code looks like this:
<div id="at">
<script type="text/javascript">
addthis_pub = 'YOUR_ID';
addthis_options = 'favorites, email, digg, delicious, google,
stumbleupon, furl, reddit, live, more';
</script>
<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php"
onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[URL]', '[TITLE]')"
onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()">
<img src="http://s9.addthis.com/button1-bm.gif"
width="125" height="16" border="0" alt="" />
</a>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/152/addthis_widget.js">
</script>
</div>
I left the surrounding <div> in there so that you could put the code at the very end of your document and then float it to the top. Anytime you have remote javascript files being called (such as http://s7.addthis.com/js/152/addthis_widget.js) it's best to include them in the HTML at the very bottom of the page since the browser will stop loading HTML while it attempts to load the javascript. If you have the javascript included at the top of the HTML code your visitor may be looking at a white screen for a while before the page loads, where as if the javascript is at the bottom of the code the user can browse around and begin reading without having to wait... and fast loading pages are certainly a good marketing idea!
The code we use to float the AddThis button at the top:
#at{
position:absolute;
top:107px;
left:507px;
}
Written by EBWS
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