We’ve all heard of social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., and we’re all finding our way to getting involved in the phenomenon.  For those of you who are totally involved, you might ask, what’s next?

Research I’ve done indicates that Social Bookmarking will be the next big thing for businesses to be involved with to increase exposure and expand their reach.  So what is Social Bookmarking?  Wikipedia says:

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

Here are the top 10-social bookmarking sites for you to consider:

·         Digg

·         Yahoo! Buzz

·         Stumble Upon

·         Reddit

·         Technorati

·         Del.icio.us

·         Kaboodle

·         Mixx

·         Propeller

·         Newsvine

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.  In many cases, you are able to connect through a Facebook profile and minimize your need to re-enter and upload basic information.

Take some time to investigate several of these social bookmarking sites and get familiar with the next BIG thing in social network marketing.  By the time they become as popular as Twitter, Facebook, and the like, you’ll be ahead of the game.  Enjoy!