Social Bookmarking for Business:

Part 3 What Social Bookmarking Sites Should You Be On



If you've decided that social bookmarking can help your business, there are plenty of aforementioned options out there. But breaking it up by client or project is a good reason to test out different networks. There are plenty of competitors trying to dominate the social bookmarking marketplace.

As a company, its best to just experiment with different services and see what resonates best with your community and customers.

"You never know who will win this battle, but it might make sense to create different accounts on different sites and then utilize them differently," says Levy. "You need to fish where the fish are, so if the users you're trying to reach are on a particular network, that's where you need to be. The biggest site traffic-wise is Delicious, so that wouldn't be a bad place to start.

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While some networks have taken criticism and struggled in recent months, Su.pr, a part of the StumbleUpon network, has had substantial success in 2010. According to Internet marketing company BlueGlass, StumbleUpon has had a 118% increase in users since 2009 and ranks first among social media traffic sources in the United States. Part of that success may be due to struggles for other competitors, but as described internally, they consider themselves more of a Pandora-like service for users than a crowd-sourcing site.

"We do see Digg and some of the other sites as more crowd-sourcing sites while we've always focused more on individual recommendations by your peers and not as a popularity contest," says Katie Gray, a spokesperson for the StumbleUpon and Su.Pr networks. "In terms of why we've grown, I think we've seen great success with the Stumble bar. So you don't have to download something or go to a site to recommend something, you can just recommend a page while you're on it.

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Whatever service you ultimately decide upon is up to you and your company, but it's also all about how you utilize it. Do your research, figure out where your community exists and do some experimentation. Regardless the size of your company or the type of business you are in, social bookmarking can be a useful tool for just about anyone.