Social bookmarking allows users to save, organize, and share links to web pages using social bookmarking sites. Bookmarks are usually public and can be viewed by other users, helping to drive traffic to bookmarked sites. Adding social bookmarking buttons to a website makes it easy for readers to share content, increasing the chances of others finding it. Social bookmarking services are organized by tags applied by users, allowing people to find bookmarked content on a given topic.

1. Social Bookmarking

2. Definition
▫ Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search,
and manage “bookmarks” of web pages.
▫ Users save links to web pages that they like or want to share, using a
social bookmarking site to store these links.
▫ These bookmarks are usually public, and can be viewed by other
members of the site where they are stored.

3. For web promotion
▫ Being listed on a social bookmarking site can drive quality traffic.
People who reach your site from a social bookmarking site are
generally there because your Web site appeared in a search for topics
they were interested in.
▫ Search engines will often list results from bookmarking sites. So if
your site is bookmarked, this is an extra opportunity to show up in
search results. Being featured on one bookmarking site can often
lead to people tagging your site on other bookmarking sites.
▫ If you are lucky they may find you through one site and bookmark
you on another, which is a great opportunity for web site promotion.

4. ▫ Increase traffic by adding social bookmarking buttons to your
website. Adding social bookmark links to your blog or web site
makes it easy for readers to save and share your content, and
therefore for others to find it.
▫ Most social bookmark services are organized by users applying
“tags” or keywords to content on a Web site. This means that other
users can view bookmarks that are associated with a chosen tag, and
see information about the number of users who have bookmarked
them. In many cases, users can also comment or vote on bookmarked
items.

5. Common features
▫ Unlike file sharing, social bookmarking does not save the resources
themselves, merely bookmarks that reference them, i.e. a link to the
bookmarked page.
▫ Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of
metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource
without first needing to download it for themselves.
▫ Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favour of or
against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become
a folksonomy.

6. Comparison with search engines
▫ With regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social
bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional
automated resource location and classification software, such
as search engine spiders.
▫ Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based
on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be
a more useful metric for end-users than systems that rank resources
based on the number of external links pointing to it.