Editing Social bookmarking (section)

== Users of the Technology ==


Users of social networks might differ from social bookmarking users particularly in the field of interest. Digg.com, the most popular and notable social networking site (Quantcast), has roughly 25 million users, mostly are male, (65%) and falls within the age 25-34 years old. As Digg becomes part of the mainstream, people in the upper brackets can confidently partake in it, unlike before when mostly people from the masses use it. Digg is the prevailing social bookmarking site. Its audience share is so large relative to everyone else. Just as how MySpace dominates the social networking space, Digg is one of the first choices when it comes to Internet marketing strategies (social media optimization.com). Behind Digg is Propeller.com, with majorly male demographic, and having 62% of its users are from the United States. Its audience is also slightly older, at 45-54 years old. Stumbleupon has almost same demographic as Propeller. A mainstream site is Reddit, with its audience coming from the 35-44 bracket, dominantly male. This could be the reason why social media topics that do well on this site include political, environmental, business and entertainment news. Delicious, probably the mother of all social bookmarking sites was overshadowed by the previous sites but they still belong to the top 5000 sites (Quantcast). Other social bookmarking sites such as Fark, Blinklist, Clipmarks and Shoutwire resemble the same statistic with having more males as their audience.

These demographic data implies that its followers are composed of the male population, ages 35-54 with relatively stable income. It is important to know the demography to be able to identify what is and what is not your target audience. Having knowledge about these data will give hints to what sites you will focus to in promoting a certain product or service. Social bookmarking helps user make their web content travel across the Internet in an effort to bring about  “omnipresence”.

Because of the benefits of social bookmarking and its growing popularity, a lot of people are getting hooked to it. The general groups of users of social bookmarking can be classified into two. The first group uses social bookmarking mainly for organizing, sharing their bookmarked sites and socializing. The second group of users uses social bookmarking mainly for the benefit of the traffic that it can generate.

The first group uses social bookmarking to keep their websites in order. They use social bookmarking so that they can easily find the websites that they found interesting whenever they need them again. All they need to do is choose from the tags that they have assigned to the sites and the bookmarking site can easily filter the websites for them. This group also uses social bookmarking to share their information with other people. Take for example in any particular group work, collecting a set of resources, sharing information and collaborating on projects is made easier through social bookmarking. People in the group can take a peek in your sites and use them for the work to be faster.

Through social bookmarking, users are able to meet people and promote themselves. Like-minded individuals find one another and create new communities of users. These people are allowed to express their different perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures.
If you think of the possibilities, there are also other useful things that social bookmarking can do for its user. It is useful in a sense that “bookmarks allow flexible information management without the limitations of some applications” (Dykeman).

Social bookmarking may be used to organize all kinds of files. If a URL is assigned to a document, social bookmarking may be used to organize any kind of document. Having on-line folders containing valuable information is also made possible and a lot of users benefit from it, greatly helping in information management.

Contact management is also made possible by social bookmarking. Biographical and contact information can be collected from the users through bookmarking their user file pages. Tags that describe these people may then be created and this makes a powerful database of contacts. All that is needed is to type a tag and all the related users that have been bookmarked will appear.

Indirectly, social bookmarking may even encourage people to enhance the content of their sites. They are encouraged to make their information useful to others in order to be visited and bookmarked. This leads us to the second group of users of social bookmarking, these users focus on generating traffic to their sites.

Users would like to generate traffic and be bookmarked for several reasons. One is that they want to be popular on the web and if a website is bookmarked by a lot of users, this would be an obvious sign of popularity. Also, the more bookmarks the post has, the faster it will be ’seen’ by the search engines and the more popular it will get.

Another reason is that users may also want to promote their business. If there are more visitors in the site of a person who has an online business, there is a greater chance of having customers.

How do these users generate traffic and increase their chances of being bookmarked? The users may use Blog Marketing. By being able to get into any of the social sites and read where the trends are going, users get ideas on what to blog or write about. The blogs that they write - after blog marketing - are now interesting to many other users. This increases the chance of their website to be visited because what they have written is based on what's popular.
Users may also use link building because this increases the number of links coming in to their site therefore increasing its visitors.

The problem with the second type of users is they tend to focus too much on the traffic they can generate. They forget the social part of social bookmarking. Some of these users bookmark their own sites in order to have a higher rank in bookmarking sites. When the search engine finds their sites, it turns out that their sites weren’t really that good.

With all the possibilities that social bookmarking offers, there are sure to be more and more types of users who will be using social bookmarking to their benefit. Hopefully, these new users won’t forget the social part of social bookmarking.