The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say,
but what we are unable to say. --Anaïs Nin
Search engines have come to recognize the value of social signals. Not only do social referrals add to the incoming links to your website, they can send traffic to you and send positive social signals to search engines. Besides Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, there are literally thousands of social websites out there. Not all of them are important, but the wider the audience you reach, the better is the chance of your website performing well in search results. Social bookmarking websites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Reditt, etc., play an important role in spreading the word about your website in the social communities.
There is social media marketing and there is social bookmarking. The two are not the same. Social media marketing is about interfacing with your target audience in the social media, building communities and providing proactive customer support. Social media marketing needs to work closely with brand messaging and is often ideally done in-house by the marketing teams.
Social bookmarking on the other hand is repetitive, labor intensive and cumbersome task. It involves sharing pages from your website, blog, etc., on social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking catalyzes the viral spreading of your web pages through social bookmarking sites. This time consuming task can easily be outsourced without risking the messaging of your website.
The key to an effective social bookmarking service is to respect the online audience and not to abuse them through spammy bombardment of bookmarks through large scale automated bookmarking tools. This can get you flagged as a spammer and even impact your website negatively.
Customized Write has been working with all our clients in spreading the word about their website through social bookmarking websites. All our clients have seen an increase in traffic and rankings for their most important keywords as a result of our bookmarking service. For most of our clients the choice was between investing in hiring a team for bookmarking at a high cost or ignoring this in their marketing mix. With Customized Write, they found the mid-point of getting quality social bookmarking without the investments.