Next in my monthly series on unsung social media platforms is Delicious. If you missed my first two posts in the series, check out what I had to say about using Digg and Reddit for B2B marketing.
Delicious is a social bookmarking site that serves up “The Tastiest Bookmarks on the Web.” (Until their recent acquisition by Yahoo, they were called Del.icio.us.) Their goal is to help you find cool stuff online and save it in one place that can be accessed from any computer. You can share your bookmarks with others, see what other people are bookmarking, and search for the most popular bookmarks across a range of topics and interests. To categorize all of your bookmarks, you use tags rather than folders. So if you like to bookmark funny videos, you can tag videos with both words and they’ll be findable under both terms.
Even before I did research on using Delicious for marketing purposes, it became obvious to me that you can build quite a reputation on Delicious for interesting and useful information. If your website, articles and blog posts get bookmarked on Delicious often enough, they’ll make it to the front page of Delicious, deliver a lot of traffic to your website, and brand you and/or your company as a source of great information.
With that said, your popularity on Delicious is dependent on the quality of your online content rather than your popularity among other Delicious users (no voting here!).
After you create a free account, here’s how to get going:
1. Create a network. A network allows you to collect your favorite users’ bookmarks in one spot—and vice versa. You can organize your network in to “bundles” to separate friends from colleagues, etc.
2. Subscribe to tags. Make a list of your favorite tags. As bookmarks are added with those tags, they’ll be delivered to your subscriptions page. It’s a great way to find new users to add to your network. (You can also create subscription “bundles” to keep things organized.)
And here’s how to get use Delicious for marketing purposes:
Post information that makes users’ lives easier. I found a great blog post about Delicious on Traffikd’s blog. To get a lot of bookmarks, they suggest posting resource lists, guides and tutorials, online tools and useful services. Avoid humor, gossip, videos, news and opinions.
Spread the word. Add a Delicious badge to your website and blog. Invite friends, colleagues, and people in your professional circle to join your network, and ask people to bookmark your website, blog, articles, etc.
Integrate your Delicious strategy with your SEO strategy. Make sure the pages, articles and blogs posts you want to be bookmarked (and become popular) on Delicious use the keywords or phrases that you are currently found for on search engines.