Social Bookmarks Do What?

Yesterday I was asked to take a look at this car audio site, and the first thing that came to my mind was “Social Bookmarks do what?” The sites navigation is controlled by the left sidebar, and right there on top, animated social bookmarking buttons.

I then started to look around their car stereo site, and found something that I thought was even stranger. What was it you ask? The lack of those buttons on the product specific pages. An example: Autoradio Adapter. I then came to the quick conclusion that the site owner only has a small understanding of social bookmarking.

Who Bookmarks

Before you slap bookmarking buttons all over your site, you should first get to know who uses social bookmarks services like Digg or Delicious. Most often it’s simply webmasters trying to market their own stuff. The other power user? The ones you would imagine, the ones who like your site or page. The question is though, is your advice or content worth a few extra clicks to bookmark. The odds are against you. Powernetshop (the car audio site) ranks really high on Google, so you know they are getting some good traffic. Doing a quick search on Digg and Delicious for their domain name gave me zero results. Power of their bookmark buttons? NONE.

Why Bookmark

So why do webmasters bookmark their pages? How does it help in their marketing? Why bookmark another persons site? Bookmarking your own site, like on Digg, could be huge. If it turns out other people like the page you marked and your site ends up on page one on Digg you could get enough traffic to crash your server. That’s a pretty good reason to bookmark pages, especially when you consider the price.

Why bookmark someone else’s site. It could be they prefer to use those services to bookmark their favorite pages instead of using their browsers bookmarking feature. I honestly don’t know anyone that uses that method though. We bookmark other pages because it’s a form of self expression. I like this, I like that, it’s all part of the social media wave.

What to Bookmark

Knowing that people like to bookmark things as a method to express themselves should help you decide where to put the bookmarking buttons on your own site. The car audio site I have use as an example picked just the main page. Bookmarking an entire car audio site may reflect a little bit about yourself, but it’s not very specific. They need to think about the “love”.

Using Best Web Image as an example. If I asked some of my loyal readers what they like about Best Web Image, do you think the answer would be “I don’t know, I just do.” It’s more likely “I found a post you made a while back, it totally helped me, and so now I keep reading.” That post is what they are going to love, not Best Web Image, and it is that page they will bookmark.

Where do I like to keep my bookmarking buttons? Right at the end of the post. See it there? Feel free to give it a try:)