Providing links to social bookmarking websites is a no-brainer. This article explains why you should have social bookmarking sites for your users.

Executive Summary

The primary reason to do provide social bookmarking links is exposure. Exposure translates into visits to your website which translates into prestige (whether perceived or not is up for debate) and revenue (if you sell a product or have advertisements on your site).

Social bookmarking provides:

• an easy for your readers to save your site in their favourites;
• an easy way for users of social bookmarking sites to find your site;
• an easy way for other content creators to find and write about your site;
• an easy method for social activism;
• an easy way for users to feel good by becoming a winner through voting (bookmarking) other winners.

Full Text

As a site owner / content creator, getting your message out there should probably be one of your main priorities. The more people who read what you write, the more visits you get. If you have advertisements on your site, with more traffic comes more revenue. In theory, the more widely read your site is, the more your voice and opinion is heard as others also voice their opinion on your opinion.

The armchair psychologist in me thinks that people are lazy, so if you can make it easy for readers to do something for you, they will. Its twice as good when they do something good for themselves that also benifits you — bookmarking your site. If you make it easy for your readers to post to their social bookmarking site of choice, it makes them happy.

If a reader bookmarks your site in their browser, there is a good chance you will have a returning visitor. If they bookmark your site at a social bookmarking site like digg or del.icio.us, not only is there a good chance they will visit your site again, but there is also a good chance that other users of that bookmarking site will also visit. And if they like your site, they too will bookmark it.

Think of people bookmarking your site as a vote. When many people ‘vote’ for your site, it becomes popular. Most, if not all, social bookmarking sites provide a way for other users to see what is currently popular or hot. Some sites provide a way to see how many other people thought that your site was bookmark worthy. Because people are busy (or lazy), they will often only view the popular page of a social bookmarking site. If your site shows up on the popular page, your exposure is immensely wider. For example, you can expect to chew through several gigs of bandwidth from several thousand users if your site were to show up on the Digg ‘front page’. I will write about my own and others experiences shortly.

The armchair psychologist in me thinks knows that people like voting for winners. If a site is popular (ergo it is a winner) then people feel obligated to vote for it as well. For this reason, sites that show up on the popular page have a huge snowball effect as everyone votes to be inline with the rest of the crowd and afirm a site’s signifigance (bookmark worthiness if you will). This is because deep down inside people believe that when you vote for a winner, you also become a winner.

Take the whole priceritephoto debacle. Perhaps in no other story has their been as clear a line between the good and bad guys, as of this writing there are 8 main stories on digg that are about priceritephoto with a collective sum of about 24 000 diggs (votes) (and 1700 comments). [A quick recap: camera store tries to rip off man using bait and switch tactics. Man writes about it on his site. Priceritephoto verbally threatens man for exposing said tactics. Man writes about it his blog. Story gets submitted to digg. Priceritephoto gets tanked by literally thousands of people spewing bad press via word of mouth / website]. People voted overwhelming for this story because by bookmarking it, they where spreading the word on the bad guys and voting for the winner (the information provider). By voting for a story that hurts that bad guys than you must be a good guy right? This is a form of social activism via the net. By writing and linking to stories about priceritephoto, websites are ‘taking to the streets’ in an attempt to raise awareness about the situation.

Social activism can be defined as attitudes and behavior that attempt to influence the social distribution of status, power, and resources. [source]

Its common sense mixed with ‘armchair psychology’: social bookmarking is good for the content creators and website owners, and is good for the users and readers. But which sites should I choose to provide links too? That is the next in this series.