Chapter 3: Using Social Bookmarks, News, and Share Buttons

In This Chapter

  • Differentiating between social bookmarks and social news
  • Gaining marketing benefits from bookmarks
  • Submitting to social bookmarking sites
  • Submitting to social news sites
  • Motivating people to bookmark and rate your site or content
  • Using social share buttons

Social bookmarks and social news services are essentially peer-to-peer referral networks. Each one is an expansion of the former tell-a-friend call to action. Rather than email a link to a site or some content to one or two people, users can notify many people at a time. Advocates of these recommendation services often argue that they filter the avalanche of websites that appear in standard search engines. Because social bookmarks and social news services rely on popular input from real people, rather than from algorithms, some Internet users place a greater value on these search results.

Hundreds of these services exist, which you can see on the All Services tab at www.addthis.com/services. In this chapter, we discuss the benefits of using these services, including higher search engine ranking, more traffic, and free visibility for minimal effort. We also emphasize using share buttons to encourage viral sharing of social media and website content.

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Search engines recognize inbound links from many (but not all) of these services, so appearing on them can ...

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