Social Bookmarking For Business Explained

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What is the Social Bookmarking?

The word Social Bookmarking consists of two parts: Social and Bookmarking. The Bookmarking means to save the link of a website on your computer for later use. In the browser Internet Explorer this is called as the ‘Favorites’ and in other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, this is called the ‘Bookmarking’. If you have added it means that you’ve already bookmarked! Adding a site to your ‘Favorites’ so that you can visit the site at a later date is called bookmarking. Social Bookmarking is exactly the samilar to the ‘local bookmarking’ except that you can save the link directly on a bookmarking website instead of saving the link on your computer.

Once you bookmark the sites, you can access them anytime by logging back into the social bookmarking site. So bookmarking is the saving of favorite websites to your computer, and social bookmarking is the saving of your favorite websites to your ‘account’ on a social bookmarking website. Your bookmarks can be shared by everyone as they are on the website instead of the computer. The website itself becomes a huge database of everyone’s favorite sites. These sites are then ranked by votes like how many times the site has been bookmarked by different members and will appear at the top when someone searches for that category or topic.
Why Social Bookmark?

When you search a major search engine for a keyword and find that 9 or the 10 sites are listed on the first search results page. You are just wasting your time checking every site on the list when only one is relevant. By social bookmarking you can search any information instantly rather than wasting a lot of time and efforts also.

Role of social bookmarking in business

  • Managing portfolios - The bloggers can provide you the browsable copies of their eBooks, videos and links to the books on Amazon, links to the best content of blogs and the professional headshots all in single folder.
  • Repository – Creating folders of the key content that they would like to become required reading for new employees, a training video, the industry trade journal article, or a popular slide presentation.
  • Product promotion – The owners of the Small business are creating visual collections of content for the ease of promoting their products.

SEO and Social Bookmarking

When a search engine determines the ranking for a site, the ‘inbound’ links are also checked by this. The more ‘value’ or ‘weight’ the inbound links has, the more they will increase ranking. Value is determined by a number of factors but some main ones are the linking pages Page Rank and trust.

The large social bookmarking sites have the hundreds of thousands of members and all adding content to the site daily which gives them the incredible Page Rank. So, when a site is bookmarked, it has just received a high Page Rank inbound link. Further, if another member searches and finds this bookmark, they may bookmark it themselves thus creating two high Page Rank links to the site


Some of the popular Social Bookmarking Sites:

Blinklist
Bloghop
BlogPulse
Blogsearch
CodeCubed
Digg
Flickr
Furl
KB Cafe

Spurl

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Twitter - How Many Profiles For You?

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Unlike other major social media platforms, Twitter allow you to create multiple personas (profiles) for your personal, business and socially conscious activities.  What is the right number for you?

The most important variable that limits your number of profiles is time.  As indicated elsewhere on the blog, an average business spends considerable time for each profile on any social media platform.  For most, it is about 32 hours per month.

If you have multiple niches that interest you, I recommend that you have more than a single Twitter presence despite the time involved.  Let me share my reasons for this recommendation.

We want to train our followers to look for our tweets, to search out our avatars or usernames, pay attention to what we have to say and follow our recommendations (or, at least investigate and consider them).  That is simply social engagement.

Each of us has multiple interests.  You may be a cat lover who is passionate about increasing the amount of energy derived from wind power.  Your business may be the restoration of old cars.  If you want to tweet frequently about each of those parts of your identity, I suggest that you need three separate profiles.  Here’s why…

You should be an interesting conversationalist.  I know that Twitter asks, “What are you doing now?”  However, think of the question as “What are you doing now that is interesting or stimulating?”  Remember that what is interesting to some of your followers might not be of interest to others.  Consequently, make each of your personas something of a specialist.  In the example, one persona tweets about cats: cat nutrition, cat health, cat rescue organizations, clever things your cat does, etc.  Use a separate profile to tweet about wind energy and yet another for your tweets about car restoration, otherwise you’ll be narrowing your active followers to cat lovers who are passionate about wind energy and older cars.

Do you want two thirds of your followers wondering why you bothered to post any given tweet.  Of course not!  That works counter to our objective of conditioning our followers to actually seeking out what we have to say.

We all wear different hats in life, including our time on Twitter.  Establish a separate Twitter profile for each of those hats…at least for each of those roles we play about which we want to converse 140 characters at a time.

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Youtube Puts Your Business On Steroids

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We know all about YouTube – More than 100 million videos viewed each day, tens of millions of unique visitors, one of the top sites on the Internet and so on. So, you’ve probably watched YouTube videos. But have you ever uploaded your own creation? The answer probably is “No”. So is there anything holding you back? It’s easier than you think to post videos, and there are even some good business reasons for doing it.

The main advantage of using YouTube video service is that it is completely free of cost at least for the basic operations. YouTube provides an easy way to host corporate videos. Some of the proven and most popular corporate videos could well be:

  1. To bring into light one’s Expertise and Thoughts
  2. Upload recordings of presentations you’ve given, to demonstrate authority and public speaking skills.
  3. Share slides from presentations on any subject matter of your choice.
  4. Create short videos of valuable tips of interest to your clients and prospects to show off your expertise.
  5. Conduct a video interview with a Subject Matter Expert (SME).
  6. Engage with the YouTube community by uploading video responses on topics related to your business or industry.
  7. Post customer video testimonials to add to your credibility or show the results of someone using your services.
  8. Put together a creative video explaining your product or service. Show your product in action using movie trailer-style: fast, creative and catchy.
  9. Promote your events using recordings and real time postings.
  10. Introduce your staff to add authenticity or take your viewers on a tour of your offices and city to help them feel connected with you.
  11. Post links to your videos on various social networks.
  12. Earn money from your videos by entering into a partnership with YouTube.
  13. Display company information in every video including name, URL, phone number and email address.
  14. Create “how to” videos to help your customers use your product or service. Post solutions to common product or service problems.
  15. Show a work-in-progress project to a customer for review and approval, without the need for a face-to-face meeting or in-person demonstration.

Any such idea is welcome in the world of YouTube and all you need is to plan your shoot, grab a camcorder, and you’re off.

For business videos, though, you’ll want to keep it simple and straightforward, and get it done quickly. The next step would be editing, and after that you need to save your video in the appropriate format for YouTube, which recommends particular settings details of which are available on their official website.

So will this be a new beginning of you using YouTube to your advantage?

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Profit From Social Media