Nathan Yerian
A content marketing strategy needs more than just good writing. Beyond blogging or compiling thoughtful articles, brands need to make an active effort to develop a dedicated readership.
Over time, a company blog will help generate web traffic, improve social media engagement, and increase search engine rankings; however, results require consistency, dedication, and strategic planning. Very rarely do small businesses build high-traffic blogs overnight.
Social bookmarking sites provide channels for companies, bloggers, and writers to market their content and increase traffic to posts. After creating a blog post or article, a writer or editor can quickly submit it to a social bookmarking community. Unlike corporate Twitter accounts and Facebook pages that attract already-loyal subscribers, social bookmarking communities allow marketers to reach and recruit new audiences.
What Is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking has been an Internet industry buzzword since 2003. Within content-focused communities, people can bookmark and share their favorite websites.
In addition to sharing content, members of these communities seek out new content to absorb and enjoy. For the most part, social bookmarking sites attract individuals who are avid consumers of new and interesting content. The most popular social bookmarking sites host more than 10 million users and are among the highest traffic online communities.
Ethics
Because social bookmarking sites are so popular and potentially powerful, spammers have found ways to attract users to low quality sites. For this reason, brands must adhere to community guidelines to ensure a positive user experience beyond search optimization and social media traffic generation. To be successful on a social bookmarking site, businesses must prioritize interesting and valuable content.
Typically, companies use Twitter to reach an existing community of followers; however, tweets can also help brands network with new audiences. Using hashtag channels, Twitter users can join popular conversations that are happening in real time. To find these conversations, tweeters can research topics in Twitter's search function and then tag status updates with the hashtag symbol (#) and the relevant channel name. When used consistently, this strategy can help drive traffic to blog posts, as users will follow popular hashtags to research conversation topics.
StumbleUpon
With a community of more than 200,000 unique visitors per day, StumbleUpon is a content-driven engine that helps users find interesting material. After creating an account, users can share photos, articles, and videos as easily with a browser add-on. Stumbleupon will then, based on the user's interests and sharing patterns, recommend relevant content.
In this way, StumbleUpon users may find their way to a company's blog. StumbleUpon can be powerful, generating thousands of pageviews to a single blog post; however, results are highly variable and hit-or-miss. As with other social sharing options, a consistent strategy is necessary for results.
Dedicated to trends, controversies, and heated dialogue, Reddit provides a forum for people to submit, vote on, and discover content. The community is highly user-driven, so stories that appear to be spammy or dull will be quickly voted down. For this reason, brands should focus on creating compelling posts that convey a strong sense of personality. It is worth taking some time to watch and monitor the Reddit community to ensure a strong brand fit.
Digg
Similar to Reddit, Digg provides a user-focused community for people to share and vote on content. On a daily basis, people post tens of thousands of stories and articles to the site, and the most popular ones will surface to the "top news" section of the site. As with StumbleUpon, Digg recommends stories to account-holders based on their interests. Even the smallest blogs can reach new users through Digg.
Persistence is Important for Creating Results.
As with any online marketing effort, a social sharing strategy requires persistence and dedication. There is no cookie-cutter formula for success, and results will take time and patience.
Over time, social bookmarking has the potential to become a valuable component to a brand's overall content marketing strategy.
If you are interested to see how you can use content marketing in an overall marketing plan that generates leads and helps close sales, download our inbound marketing e-book:
