If you own a blog, you must know how to use social bookmarking services.

Social bookmarking, in a layman’s term, is a personal collection of your favourite bookmarks and share them with other members. You can also see what others bookmark.

Some of the widely used social bookmarking sites are StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and many more.

The main idea is to buzz an article or blog post to the community – if yours is good enough, you will see it in the front page and will get more attention from visitors and fellow members – ultimately, more fame and visitors to your blog.

Social bookmarking today: too artificial?

The potential of social bookmarking, and social media as a whole, is exceptional.

Techniques and methods to optimise the use of social bookmarking for the benefits of your business are discovered, developed, and shared among the community. This is the power, as well as the weakness of social bookmarking.

Weakness?

Yes – just like search engine optimisation (SEO), social bookmarking optimisation is a ‘secret’ known to those involved in Internet marketing. The main idea is to get more links, as well as more visitors to your blog, increasing your blog exposure to both search engines and visitors.

Nothing wrong with those, actually. However, the social bookmarking service is, well, becoming more and more artificial these day. However, businesses will (still) reap the results, even though it is artificial!

Don’t get me wrong – I also use some basic, legitimate, strategies in social bookmarking to ‘advertise’ my blog. In a sense, it just like leaving your business card on the table of the restaurant you just visited, with a hope someone will pick it up and find it useful.

The problem is, there are blogs and sites that use SEO and social bookmarking campaign that basically, eliminate the human factors in socialising in social media.

For example, bland and artificial comments on stories and articles in a social bookmarking site (trust me, some of them are not even relevant – the main purpose of this, is to leave your website or blog address in the comment box).

Another example is the now-common ‘underground’ tactic of ‘I bookmark your blog if you bookmark mine’ – i.e. I fave you on Technorati if you fave my blog. With the practice is against most social bookmarking sites’ Terms of Service (TOS), it is widely used by bloggers.

What to do now?

Well, it is all coming back to you and your ethical view points, really.

If you think exchanging faves just to get your blog better exposure is OK, than it’s OK. If you exchanging faves because you think the other person’s blog is excellent and he/she thinks yours too, then you are a ‘pure’ social media user :)

Whatever happens, social bookmarking will always be the best way to expose your blog and business.

Ivan Widjaya
Social bookmarker