Bookmarking For Social Media Marketing

Social bookmarking sites are terrific tools for the digital age. My favorites are Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon, but their are many that you can explore. One of the reasons why I like those three is they have the largest community and tend to get the most exposure.

Social bookmarking can be a used in two ways:

1. Generating more exposure and external links for your content. Once you bookmark and tag your articles, blog posts, videos and such they are recognized and cataloged for others who are following you. You are letting them know that for whatever subject you tagged the content under, this is valuable information. Key here is you just can’t be tagging your own content. These sites are sophisticated enough to know if you are doing that, and will not allow you to continue.  Also, people will lose interest in what you are tagging if you are just tagging and promoting your own content. If the idea is to become a trusted authority using social media, being a self promoter is not the way to accomplish this goal.

2. Managing work flow for down stream management of writing and publishing tasks. One of the biggest obstacles we get from senior execs is that social media marketing requires to much time. Not if you plan right and integrate tasks into the work flow of your organization. Social bookmarking sites allow you to create a tag structure with group access so information can be collected using the “collective wisdom” of the exec team. A tight tag structure like writers, publications, partners, bloggers, forums, articles, allows your organization to collect, organize and then disseminate this information down, or out, of the organization for content to be developed and published. For example, you can tell a junior staff member in marketing to keep an eye on the forums and blogs that are tagged and make sure they regularly listen and participate in them. No further communication is needed and this task is now outsourced (or in-sourced in this case).

Now, you need to be careful here that you don’t end up just abdicating these tasks to the point where you’re not getting the benefit from participation. There is a balance that you need to strike and only you will know what that is. Minimally you need a feedback loop that keeps you plugged into what is going on.

Social bookmarking is not a panacea when it comes to marketing exposure. It is a nice to have but if you have not done things like article marketing, blogging, video distribution and building web 2.0 pages like Facebook yet, you can probalby spend your time more effectively elsewhere for now. I do suggest using it for work flow quickly because it makes implementing social media marketing so much easier.

Also, keep in mind these are two totally different objectives for bookmarking and should be treated as such. Have separate accounts so competitors can’t see what you are tracking for content and strategy development purposes.  Create a persona for your work flow account.

Are you using bookmarking? Do you have any ticks to make it more effective?