Is Social Bookmarking Worth the Hassle?

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is the practice of an individual or a group of people submitting a particular website to an online community in order for others to evaluate the content of the website. While popular social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon and Digg, have the ability to create a short term internet buzz, their existence rests in reducing websites into the internet version of a sound bite. Sometimes a good sound bite will capture the essence of the message; a poor sound bite is forgotten several minutes, if not seconds, after initial exposure.

The quality of the traffic from social bookmarking appears to reflect this sound bite model. As one forum poster noted, “The goals of a social networking audience [are to obtain] immediate psychological stimulation for almost no work” (Sitepoint Forums). This statement suggests that social bookmarking sites offer immediate gratification. Another poster in this thread observed:

“Let’s say for example you get a front-page placement on Digg. You’ll receive thousands of visitors, but with the nature of their community you’ll get very few return and next to no one clicking your ads, whilst you’ve lost gigs of bandwidth. Stumbleupon works in the same way, with users coming to you once only to click the button again to head elsewhere.” (Sitepoint Forums).

Social Bookmarking is Depressing

How depressing. From these two statement, it seems that social bookmarking sites: [1.] send people who are unwilling to click on the advertisements, and [2.] either drain or tie up a server’s finite resources. One reason for the increasing popularity of social bookmarking sites is the ease in which people process website “snippets.” I would imagine that this is akin to reading Cliff’s Notes in lieu of the actual book.

What are the disadvantages of social bookmarking?

• Since social bookmarking relies on human beings, rather than on statistical algorithms, to rank content, there is an increased possibility of manipulating and over inflating the popularity of a particular website. In fact, there are some individuals out there who offer to bookmark a site in exchange for a fee.
• It would appear that people who frequent social bookmarking sites tend to spend less time on the sites that they do visit, and as a result, it is less likely that they will continue to interact with the sites that are visited.
• Increasing competition with other webmasters also using social bookmarking in order to receive traffic to their own sites.

What are the advantages of social bookmarking?

• Human traffic from bookmarking services is better than no traffic at all. There is always a chance that 1% of the visitors will perform some sort of website interaction, e.g., leave a blog comment, click a Yahoo! or Google advertisement, purchase a product, refer a friend, or return at some point in the future.
  • It would be interesting to find the correlation between: [1.] those people visiting a website through social bookmarking site, and [2.] the conversion of this social traffic into sales or clicks on Google advertisements.
• Another benefit of traffic from social bookmarking sites is the grass roots exposure and the establishment of band name recognition.

At the end of the day, traffic from social bookmarking services has various meanings and implications for different webmasters. Some webmasters loathe the traffic because of its taxing effects on the webserver. Other webmasters love and crave the attention and buzz that this traffic brings, regardless of its duration. And finally, there are other webmasters who do not care. Even though the “sound bite effect” propagated from social bookmarking sites is short lived, there is a chance that authority websites will pick up on those sites receiving the most attention and will write up a blog post or a product review.

In conclusion, social bookmarking takes little time to do. And depending upon the particular goal of the traffic, some webmasters might make more of an effort than others to do it. However, the attention to social bookmarking should never be greater than the attention devoted to creating fresh content.

If the content isn’t created, then how can it get bookmarked?