Social Bookmarking and Social Media – Aren’t They the Same?
This is what most people tell me, especially people who are new to social media. Apart from the fact that they both start with the word “social”, they are two completely different things.
What I am going to talk about in this post is to give you a better understanding of what they are both about (in layman’s terms) to make it easier for you to understand (especially if you are new to social media).
social bookmarking
Let me first talk about social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking is where people come together to share websites, web pages, or news articles that they find interesting, newsworthy, or that they think the community would be interested in knowing about. Some examples of social bookmarking sites are the popular Digg, Propeller, Delicious, and Stumbleupon, where people meet and share their favorite sites or web pages. Signing up for these sites is free (in fact, it takes less than 5 minutes to sign up for one) and you can start adding sites right after signing up.
Marketers also make use of these social bookmarking platforms as one of the means of driving traffic to their websites – if the website is interesting enough, this traffic generation method can help drive large volumes of traffic to your website. your website.
Social networks
Think of social networking sites as social functions that you attend, where you mingle with people who have similar interests as you.
These social networking sites exist to allow like-minded people (from all over the world) to meet in one place to interact: all you need to do is sign up, create a simple profile (where you fill in some personal information, plus specify your hobbies, interests, favorite TV shows, movies, songs, etc.), provide a photo of yourself and you’re ready to go.
With these social networking sites, you can find people with interests and hobbies similar to yours and make friends with them.
Examples of social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
Marketers are also making use of these social networking sites to find potential customers and if used correctly (what I mean by using these social networking sites correctly is using them to really help potential customers with whatever problem they with a combination of information and product recommendations, rather than just spamming them with product promotions), these sites can help generate large amounts of revenue.
I hope that with the above article, you now have a better understanding of what social bookmarking and social networking are all about, as well as the differences between each of them.