Social bookmarking

On many web pages you’ll often see small icons accompanying a story or article, maybe a bit like these:

What do they mean?

They enable you to bookmark the current web page in the social bookmarking system of your choice.

So what's social bookmarking?

Wikipedia says that, “In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains.” Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace and StumbleUpon are examples of social-bookmarking websites.

A tidy explanation of social-bookmarking is given in the YouTube video below, which discusses how del.icio.us works:

What benefits do social bookmarking websites offer my website?

We know that having links to a website can help that website’s rankings in the search engines, particularly with Google. Increasing the reach of your website is essential. Why not make it easy, therefore, for visitors to your website to save a bookmark to a page on your website in their social book marking system? If your website gets links on these sites, and word gets about, you will have started your own viral marketing campaign.

So how can I make it easy for visitors to social bookmark pages on my website?

Well, this brings us back to the small icons above. The main thing is to consider which social bookmarking systems your website caters for. Do you include Digg or Facebook or…? That’s far too difficult a decision to make. Much simpler to add them all … and any others that appear as time goes by. We do this by adding a social-bookmarking widget to a web page, and the two that I’ve been looking at recently are AddThis (www.addthis.com) and AddToAny (www.addtoany.com). Both are very similar in that they provide a service that can transfer bookmarks of (your website’s) web pages to any of the social bookmarking systems that your visitors may belong to. I prefer the behaviour of the AddThis widget, especially the way it handles email, but the AddToAny widget wins hands-down because it doesn’t depend upon Flash, which some browsers aren’t configured for.

There’s an AddToAny widget at the bottom of every article in this blog, so you can easily open it up and explore what it does.