The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media

Chapter 14. Other Social Media Marketing Tools

SOCIAL MEDIA TAGGING AND BOOKMARKING

Instead of bookmarking sites via your browser's bookmark function, why not share the fun and go social, using sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon. These belong to a category known as social bookmarking and are a way to organize, collate, and categorize the Web using a classification structure called "tags." You are then able to share these bookmarks with others, which is where the social part comes in.

Tags are nothing more than labels applied to a given bookmarked resource. Tagging is a bottom-up, user-generated form of categorization that allows people to use whatever vocabulary is helpful to them. While this may seem a bit chaotic and messy, it has become the de facto standard for annotating and classifying content on the Web. Practically every form of social media site, from photo-sharing to bookmarking to blogs, uses tagging. You might even notice some sites have what is referred to as a "tag cloud" to visualize this structure.

Figure 14.1. Tag Cloud

While tags are useful as a means of classification, they also provide value for searches. For Google and other search engines, those tags are nothing more than keywords indexable by the engines. Not only that, sites such as Technorati (www.technorati.com ...