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. Aside from the fact that they both begin with the word “social”, they are two completely different things.
What I’m going to talk about in this post is to give you a better understanding of what both are about (in layman’s terms) so that it’s easier for you to understand (especially if you’re new to social media).
Social bookmarks
Let me talk about social bookmarking first.
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. Some examples of social bookmarking sites are the popular Digg, Propeller, Delicious, and Stumbleupon, where people gather and share their favorite websites or web pages. These sites are free to sign up (in fact, it takes less than 5 minutes to sign up for one) and you can start adding sites immediately after signing up.
Marketers also use these social bookmarking platforms as one of the means to drive traffic to their websites – if the website is interesting enough, this traffic generation method can help drive large volumes of traffic to your website.
Social media
Think of social media sites as social functions that you go to, where you mingle with people who have interests similar to yours.
These social media sites exist to allow like-minded people (from all over the world) to come together in one place to interact – all you need to do is sign up, create a simple profile (where you are asked to fill in some personal details, In addition to specifying your hobbies, interests, favorite TV shows, movies, songs, etc.), provide a photo of yourself and you’re good to go.
With these social networking sites, you can search for people with interests and hobbies similar to yours and befriend them.
Examples of social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
Marketers are also making use of these social media sites to find potential customers, and if they are used correctly (what I mean by using these social media sites correctly is using them to genuinely help potential clients with any issues that have 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 media are all about, as well as the differences between each of them.
