Turbo Social Media Marketing » Social Bookmarking | Turbo Social Media Marketing

The Pros and Cons of Bookmarking with StumbleUpon

Zack — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:34:43 +0000

As we have discussed in previous blog posts, Social Bookmarking is a key part of the whole Social Media Marketing System. They bookmarking sites are a great way to build back links, as well as put your information on the internet for more people to see. Some of these sites help to create traffic tot eh bookmarking site, where people can read your blog posts and follow you there, where as others help direct a lot of traffic directly to your site, which is what most people strive to do. However the amount of traffic is not always a good thing.

StumbleUpon has moved its way up in popularity of most used Social Bookmarking sites, as it is fun and easy to use and it drives mounds of traffic to your site. The downside to this traffic is built into the way StumbleUpon is used. Most people download the Stumble Toolbar, and it allows them to randomly flip through websites based on their favorite topics. So if you are a Business Enthusiast, you can flip through all Business related sites that have been bookmarked within StumbleUpon. Now this is a whole lot of fun, however there is a huge drawback: it drives the bounce rate for the site sky high. The bounce rate of a site is determined by the amount of people who visit a site and leave after only viewing 1 page, or before a specified amount of time.

Take a look at this picture below from one of the sites was manage. For the month of April, they had 109 visits to their site, however the average time on the site was 1 second, and the bounce rate was over 97%!! This is not quality traffic, this is people who came to the site and did not find it interesting or did not find what they were looking for.

StumbleUpon Stats (click to enlarge)

What most people forget about when driving traffic to their site, is that they should be targeting their traffic to drive in a higher quality of prospects. Sure StumbleUpon can help drive hoards of people to your site, however, you rarely find any business from it. I am sure you can find that one diamond in the rough, and the odds are, the more people you drive to your site, you will find 1 or 2. However, from our experience the only thing you get from StumbleUpon is a sky high Bounce Rate, a lower average viewing time on pages and a lower pages viewed per visit. And if you are like me, and really enjoy reading your analytics reports and finding out the best trends to observe, this StumbleUpon effect throws a blanket over the whole thing, and it becomes very difficult to get an accurate reading.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and the Importance of Social Bookmarking, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Manager Client Services, Turbo Social Media

Twitter + Mixx = Tweetmixx: A Great Step Forward in Social Media

Zack — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:27:35 +0000

As many of my friends and fans on Mixx already know (via Email from Mixx), Mixx and Twitter have teamed up to bring us Tweetmixx. Tweetmixx is a blend of both worlds as Twitter reaches so many people and connects them instantly and Mixx gives us the power of searching for the topic we find most interesting.

No longer do you have to search through your twitter posts from friends and fans to find anything relevant to what you want. On Mixx everything can be categorized more efficiently, so everything you would want to know about is right in front of you.

The question is: Is this necessary? Does this help? In my opinion, yes this is a great step forward. This Tweetmixx dashboard is a great all-in-one tool that allows you allows you to do everything in one place, rather than having to go to different places to tweet, for saved searches, another to check out your friends’ links, search for news breaking topics, and yet another to see the most popular content on twitter.

As the email suggests “Tweetmixx turns Twitter into a content recommendation site, even if you don’t follow anyone.” it makes finding relevant information so much easier and connecting with your friends and fans a breeze.

The joining of these sites is a huge advancement in Social Media. So many of the Social Media sites out there offer so much but lack in other areas. One might be good for content sharing, while another is good for networking while a 3rd is great for viral videos. Tweetmixx is a bit ahead of its time as Social Media sites are still building steam, but do not be surprised if you see more joint ventures such as this in the future.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and Social Networking, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

Social Bookmarking Spotlight: Mixx

Zack — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:58:59 +0000

As we have touched on before, Social Bookmarking is a large part of Social Media Marketing, as it helps create more buzz about you and puts more links out there to lead to your site. Here at Turbo, we really try to utilize as many of these Bookmarking sites as possible to increase to amount of traffic to our site. We have been seeing amazing results from Digg and Stumbleupon, but recently we have seen some significant growth from another site: Mixx.

Mixx is a wonderful Social Bookmarking site with lots of great features that encourage you to interact with other users and promote strong rankings. Much like other Bookmarking sites, you are able to follow friends and become fans of other users so you can be notified when they bookmark (or “MIxx” in this case) an article/video/picture that you might find very interesting. The power behind this, is the more you interact with this online community, the better chances of more people reading your articles, which we know usually translates into a larger group of people filtering into your website. This online community offers everything from commenting back and forth on different articles, Polls to see what other people are thinking about and a wide variety of categories from Sports, Business, and Entertainment to Tech, Health, Science and Fun

At first, it may seem Mixx is not as simple as some of the other bookmarking sites out there, as there is much more here to participate in. However, after spending a little time on the site you will see how easy and fun it can be to use. Also the simple complexity to this system also allows for more narrowed in topics, allowing you to really find the information you are searching for. I am personally a fan of quite a few Bookmarking sites, although, Mixx is by far my favorite, as it not only allows me a great way to interact with other users, but it also creates some terrific results.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. Now would also be a great time to try “Mixxing” your first article. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

How Important are Social Bookmarking sites in Content Syndication for Social Media Marketing?

Matthew Arndt — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:30:18 +0000

Many people have heard of things like “The Digg Effect”, where a link to a blog post gets pushed to the top of Digg.com (one of the biggest social bookmarking sites out there for those of your just getting acquainted with the term) and the server crashing as a result of having hundreds of thousands of visitors to the website in a matter of minutes. BUT, there are better reasons than just an influx of traffic to your website as a reason to syndicate to the social bookmarking websites.

In this post, I will share with you a few secrets that we have found when it comes to syndicating content.

Syndicating your content to social bookmarking websites can create additional listings in the search engines.

Below, I have posted a screen shot that shows the search for “Dallas Zerona” from one of our clients Dr. Jade Malay of http://www.BodyByZeronaLaser.com . As you can see from the image, the top 5 results are a mix of social bookmarking links that we submitted on her behalf with a double listing for her actual website! (Click the image below for a larger view)

Syndicating your content to social bookmarking sites can help to drive traffic.

In this screen snip is proof that Dr Don of http://www.TheZeronaLaser.com got traffic as a result of the syndication to the social bookmarking sites. (Click the image below for a larger view)

Syndicating your content to social bookmarking sites can result in a higher Google Page Rank for the page submitted.

After less than a month of this post by Dr Don, with the syndication done correctly, this page received a Google Page Ranking of 3/10. While this may not seem like a big deal to the majority of you, most sites take a VERY long time to get a Page Rank of 3, and this was done in about a month!

Bottom line here is that syndicating content to social bookmarking websites is extremely important for optimizing your SEO and Social Media Marketing efforts. Of course, there are some other principals that you should always do when you are using social bookmarking sites like making sure to use unique titles and descriptions for each bookmarking site as well as encouraging your friends to write reviews, and “digg”, “thumbs up”, or comment on the bookmark. Although we all know how time consuming this process can be, it is incredibly important in the overall scheme of your social media marketing.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and Social Bookmarking, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give me a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Matthew Arndt, President, Turbo Social Media