Social bookmarking website - definition
A “social bookmarking website” is a website that allows their users to save their bookmarked websites online and share them with other people. The typical social bookmarking website then lists the most popular bookmarked sites, sorted by the quantity of bookmarks and divided by category.
The importance of social bookmarking websites as marketing tool
Social bookmarking websites have reached an immense popularity - several of the most popular social bookmarking websites are reaching 1 million visitors per day or more.
Social bookmarking websites as Traffic source
If your website becomes one of the most popular bookmarks, most social bookmarking sites put your link on their front page - sending you up to 30k of traffic (visitors).
Social bookmarking websites as Source for inbound links
A second, in the long term even more important benefit of reaching the front page is the huge amount of inbound links (usually up to 1000 inbound links) your site is getting afterwards from other sites using you as link reference. From an SEO point of view, this is probably the most efficient way of increasing the link popularity of a website at the moment.
Social bookmarking websites as Viral marketing campaign epicenter
The combined power of traffic and link popularity growth also makes social bookmarking websites an ideal media platform for launching viral marketing campaigns with link baits.
The most popular social bookmarking websites
Source: Search Engine Strategies Conference 2007 New York
1) Digg.com
- 2 million+ visitors daily
- 50-100 votes required for front page
- 10-30k visits on average after front page listing
- 1000+ links after a few weeks
Add Digg social bookmarking functionality to your site here.
2) Del.icio.us
- 1 million+ visits daily
- 20-30 votes required for front page
Add del.icio.us social bookmarking functionality to your site here.
3) Reddit.com
- 500k visits
- 20-40 votes required for front page
- 4-10k visits average
- ~600+ links after a few weeks
Add Reddit social bookmarking functionality to your site here.
4) Netscape.com
- 250k visits daily
- 20-40 votes required for front page
- 4-8k visits average
- ~300+ links per article
Add Netscape social bookmarking functionality to your site here.
5) StumbleUpon.com
- 3 million+ users
- 50-5,000 continuous visits
- ~25-250 links
Add Stumbleupon social bookmarking functionality to your site here.
From theory to practice: Link baiting for social bookmarking websites
What do you need to do to reach the front page of a social bookmarking website?
Create optimized content!
Publish content that meets the criteria of a link bait as defined here:
- “Something unique, something that is extremely useful or impressive, astonishing or shocking.”
- “…any kind of content and media: A tool, a text, a video, an image or any kind of service that fits the attributes described before. ”
Many of the social bookmarking sites, especially Digg, have a focus on tech/news/geek content, so take this fact into consideration when choosing or creating link bait content - to be able to reach a big target audience.
Optimize the webpage containing the content!
- Add social bookmarking links
Make it easier for your visitors to social bookmark your website: Add bookmarking links
Check your server hardware and connection
- Prepare your server for massive traffic
Ready to get dugg? When a lot of people are bookmarking your website on digg.com, your server and server connection will have to stand up to 30000 visitors per day.
Bandwidth consumption
Depends on the total file size of your webpage (including graphics).
For example if your webpage has a total file size of 360kb, 30000 visits will cause 10.8 Gigabytes of bandwidth consumption. If these 30000 visits occur within one day, you will need to provide 1 Megabit/second on average. However, keep in mind that traffic peaks will probably double or triple this amount and if you don’t want to lose any traffic, you’ll need to adapt your webserver connection accordingly. If you are unsure about your connection, ask your webhost on this.
Cpu and Ram consumption
Dynamically generated pages will consume more cpu and ram resources than static webpages.
To stand 30000 visitors per day, roughly estimated minimum requirements would be a 2 Ghz processor and 512 Megabytes of Ram, for dynamically generated pages using database connections, 1 Gigabyte of Ram might be needed - this depends on a lot of other factors and individual configuration as well though.
A dedicated server is definately recommended as most virtual/shared hosting accounts will not be able to provide the level of performance needed for a front page listing on the major social bookmarking websites.
Social bookmarking websites: Alexa traffic trends
Which social bookmarking site will be the most valuable one for promotion in future?
Let’s try to estimate traffic trends with Alexa…
Alexa.com tracks and publicly displays website traffic by measuring website visits with their browser toolbar. Due to the lack of equal distribution to the various groups of internet users and countries, the Alexa website rankings are in many cases extremely inaccurate. However, they can be used to roughly estimate traffic tendencies.
As you can see, del.icio.us seems to be losing quite a lot of traffic, stumbleupon seems to be gaining some popularity, most others are maintaining their traffic. As said before, Alexa stats are not very accurate - however, they seem to confirm that Digg currently is and will in the near future most fortunately stay the leading social bookmarking site.
That’s why if you’re going to specifically optimize your link bait for the individual target audience on one social bookmarking site, I would recommend to target Digg.
“Google Bowling“, also called “reverse SEO” is a technique, based on the simple fact that there is a second way of getting on top of the Google search results: