5 Social bookmarking sites that will boost your SEO traffic
Social sites might be a way for you to switch off after a long day, or to make the most of some downtime, but social bookmarking sites are increasingly being used by marketers in order to drive organic traffic to their website. Whether promoting your brand, engaging with internet users, or identifying current trends, socials are a great way of establishing a brand identity – and making sure that the right people know about it.
What is social bookmarking?
So you know your Twitter from your TikTok and your LinkedIn from your live stream, but maybe you’ve not heard of social bookmarking before. This is when content is “tagged” by its social platform so that if you want to go back to that post you can simply look in your social bookmarks under the name of platform.
For example, if you write about YouTube SEO strategies, by tagging that content as “YouTube”, it’ll appear in the YouTube section of your social bookmarking.
Here are some social sites we use here at Embryo in order to social bookmark our posts and boost our visibility:
1. TikTok
The relative toddler of the social platform world at less than 10 years old, TikTok might not be the first thing that springs to mind when considering how you can market your business. However, despite the app’s target audience of younger generations rather than stereotypically suit-wearing business people, it shouldn’t be underestimated as a digital marketing tool.
With #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt quickly gaining traction as a trend last year, and almost 50% of users purchasing a product or service from a business after seeing it advertised or reviewed on the platform, it’s undeniable that TikTok has an impressive influence in digital marketing.
What makes TikTok so effective as a marketing tool is its unique For You page. This presents users with new content mostly in the form of 30-60 second videos that encourages new discoveries. As a brand, this gives you the unique opportunity to reach a wider audience.
Our Head of Paid Social, Harriet Tuite, shares why she thinks that TikTok is such a good digital marketing platform:
“TikTok can be an extremely effective marketing tool because it allows you to be creative and reach niche audiences.
The TikTok algorithm is all focused on engagement, which means that there are hundreds of sub-sections to cover all interests – such as BookTok and CoffeeTok, alongside trending topics, songs and dances.
If you get creative and test new styles, you can build an engaged community who get to see the human side of your brand and ultimately become loyal customers.”
2. LinkedIn
If TikTok is the social toddler, LinkedIn is the proud mother encouraging you to shout about your achievements, while she not so surreptitiously nudges you towards approaching new career opportunities.
“I just wish they were more proactive,” you hear her whisper to your successful friends when she thinks you’re not listening.
Founded in 2003 and with more than 800 million members worldwide, LinkedIn was designed with social networking at the forefront of its professional purpose.
Because of its unique B2B networking focus, LinkedIn is the perfect platform for building brand awareness amongst like-minded businesses in your target industry. From marketing job openings to attracting new talent to your company and publishing the success of recent campaigns, it allows you to generate traffic to your site and identify quality leads to improve the chance of conversions.
3. Facebook Groups
Founded a year later than LinkedIn in 2004, Facebook is the father figure in this familial social analogy. Meta’s original success story, and the most popular social networking site with more than 3 billion monthly users, its “Facebook memories” feature is equivalent to your old man reminiscing “back in my day…”.
Originally founded so that Harvard University students could connect with other students at the institution, it’s since evolved into a space where people can post status updates, “check-in” to locations, and comment on each other’s statuses and images.
Additionally, people can create pages for upcoming events and join “groups” which allow people to connect over shared interests. At it’s core, connecting people has remained Facebook’s driving purpose.
It is these Facebook Groups specifically that allow Facebook to make that transition from social networking site to social bookmarking site. These groups allow you to build a community based on mutual interests which can reflect user search intent. In turn, this is helpful in identifying target audiences and promoting user engagement with members about your recent content.
4. Instagram
Following later, 2006 saw the birth of Instagram, the cool older sister obsessed with taking selfies and documenting her iced lattes and avocado toast. With each new evolution, the Meta platform seems to adopt more and more successful attributes from socials until it has become the mecca for photo documentation and live video sharing.
Originally a platform where you could simply post pictures, like and comment, and follow other users, Instagram then adopted the “stories” function originally used by Snapchat. More recently it took a leaf from it’s younger sibling and started including “reels” in its feed which mimic TikTok’s short videos.
Like TikTok, Instagram is useful for digital marketing because it helps your target audience discover new products or services through a wide variety of content formats all in one place. Not just a place for selfies, it’s also a place where you can make visible your company’s achievements, as well as your brand values and developments.
In terms of social bookmarking, Instagram is a great platform for getting mentions and tags to encourage users to follow their curiosity from the visually aesthetic image that pops up in their daily scroll to your website.
5. Twitter
Last but not least, and sharing a birth year with Instagram, Twitter is like the older brother who went off to university, picked up an interest in politics, and now uses his opinions to start arguments at the dinner table when he’s home for the holidays.
Recently bought by literally the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, Twitter was originally invented originally invented as a way for users to share their thoughts with their followers and to form idealogue networks through the use of hashtags.
These days, it hasn’t changed much, apart from being owned by someone new, (Elon Musk), having increased it’s character-length limitation from 140 to 180, oh, and it’s now called ‘X’. Since his recent purchase, Musk has also all but completely undermined the social elitist community on the platform and replaced them with the economically elite, by offering a blue tick in exchange for payment, rather than the number of followers you have.
Twitter’s main selling point as a place to digitally market your brand is it’s huge outreach. As the fifth most visited website in the world, it’s used by 368 million people to post links, content and images in the form of tweets. The term ‘tweet’ has even become a commonly used verb in its own right.
The platform allows businesses to increase brand awareness by engaging in real-time conversations and reaching specific target audiences through hashtags and trending topics.
Socialising your strategy
As social sites continue to play an increasingly important role in digital marketing, being able to save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share in the form of social bookmarking is an incredibly useful tool to have up your sleeve. It can help you promote content and increase traffic to your site in order to establish yourself amongst an ever-expanding social market.
To learn more about social bookmarking could help you to expand your business and generate more leads to your website, contact us today!
