The basic idea behind social bookmarking sites is that individual members can find content anywhere on the Internet and bookmark it for other members of that particular social bookmarking site to find. By adding keywords ‘Tags’ to the information when it is added to the social bookmarking site, the member ensures that other members who have similar interests will find it and perhaps bookmark it themselves.
When several individual members bookmark the same content, that information starts to gain some credibility on the social site in question, meaning that still more members start to bookmark it.
When this happens in sufficient numbers, the content (which can be an article on a webpage, a news story, a video or any other kind of content published on a site or blog somewhere) might appear on the front page of that particular social site. If so, the website on which your content is published is likely to be hit by a tidal wave of traffic, thousands of people who all arrive on the same day.
Whilst this tidal surge of traffic is not likely to last for more than 24 to 48 hours, if even a very small percentage of those visitors become regulars on your site, your viewer figures will increase by a huge margin.
And of course, if you have a product or service to sell, it is quite likely that anyone who chooses to visit your site is a targeted visitor, so some sales are likely as well.
In truth however, the chances of your content landing on the homepage of one of the major social bookmarking sites are fairly slim.
Nevertheless, it is still worth submitting your information to the social sites because every time content from your site is published, it adds an invaluable back link from that social site to yours. As many social sites have attained Google Page Rank of seven to ten, they have the power to boost your site as well. It’s contagious popularity.
The only problem with submitting information to a large number of social bookmarking sites is that doing so can be a very time-consuming process.
Moreover, you should be wary of submitting information about new content on your site to the same social bookmarking sites every time, because if you do so, it begins to look like you could be spamming the social site in question and you could get banned! Twitter and Facebook are both very sensitive to spamming people with ads and suspend people easily so be very careful.
