The team behind Pressitt, Social Media News Release creation and publishing service have come up with a guide on getting the most from social bookmarking and news sites. These play an important part of the SMNR share process alongside other sharing processes such as sharing via email to your PR contacts online and offline, adding to your news wire release via a link and forwarding to targeted industry experts and peers.

What are bookmarking sites?

Social news and social bookmarking sites are websites/portals that save website posts, blog posts, images, and videos - anything that a wider audience would want to view.

Social News sites also tend to have voting systems where users can vote for or against the articles posted, allowing readers to quickly navigate to the best articles. The more votes you get the higher ranked and recommended the post is, making it more visible and likely to attain a place on the home page where it gains maximum exposure.

Which is the best site?

One of the most popular sites using a voting system is Digg. It is separated into two sections: a ‘most popular’ list, which comprises articles receiving the most votes in the past few days or weeks, and an ‘upcoming’ list, which are new articles. Most other social news sites follow a similar setup.

Social news sites are also a good place to get a discussion going just like a blog commenting system.

Let’s get started

Pick out a social news site and browsing through the categories to familiarise yourself with the layout and the functionality. Try adding new articles to the site or commenting on existing articles. To do this you will need to register and set up an account.

Digg ,Reddit, Mixx are among the more popular sites but you might be better off targeting your efforts to a niche site that is more geared to your SNMR,  brand, products and services.

How to Use Social Bookmarking to Promote Your SMNR

Social bookmarking and news sites are a free and effective way to get* backlinks and drive traffic to websites and blogs. The bigger sites such as Digg and Reddit have the most traffic and are a good place to start.

When you start looking around the site pay attention to the blogs, websites, and articles that are bookmarked the most and ranked the highest on the home page, it’s also worth looking at how the headlines and summaries are written. This will give you an idea of what people like to see.

*Backlinks: Backlinks are links from one website to another website. The high Page Rank the website that contains the link has, the more power it has to help BOOST the linked website with its search engine position pushing above it’s rivals. So the more high quality backlinks you get the better position Google grants you.

Submission tips

• Don’t *spam, you will get a bad reputation and nobody will vote your pages up
• No sales copy - it’s boring and nobody fall for it!
• Entertainment posts, relevant news, and a snappy hook all help to encourage votes
• Only submit quality content - interesting and well written.
• Vote on articles quickly. Articles that get at least 25 votes within the first 15 minutes will rise through the social bookmarking ranks faster than articles that get 25 votes over two days.
• Don’t just vote for your own post and articles - If you are only promoting your own blogs and affiliate marketing programs users will quickly lose interest in your content. Remember, other users can view your profile to see what you are submitting or promoting.
• The best way to promote your content and get it on the front page for maximum effect is to get colleagues to vote for it, also Tweet about it ” Hey great post on xxxxx I think it really deserves a Digg!” and link to the post on Digg

*SPAM: In terms of social news sites means that you are only looking to submit and publish your own related content to gain an advantage. Users will realise you are not being part of the community and will not vote your submissions up, so you have no chance of gaining front page status. Spam is also considered to be one of the following topics, alcohol, activism, extremism, petition, prescription or other drugs, religious, ringtones, tobacco or vitamins related themes.

Top social bookmarking and news sites

1  digg.com

383,598,000 - Inbound Links | 33,433,760 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 11,400,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 183 - Alexa Ranking.

2  Yahoo! Buzz

6,031,000 - Inbound Links | NA - Compete Monthly Visitors | 3,600,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | NA - Alexa Ranking.

3  StumbleUpon.com

234,000,000 - Inbound Links | 4,418,609 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,100,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 362 - Alexa Ranking.

4  reddit.com

161,685,000 - Inbound Links | 4,908,990 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,300,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 441 - Alexa Ranking.

5  Technorati.com

175,287,000 - Inbound Links | 3,309,174 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 662 - Alexa Ranking.

6  del.icio.us

427,665,000 - Inbound Links | 1,623,083 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 317,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 2,476 - Alexa Ranking.

7  kaboodle.com

2,600,000 - Inbound Links | 3,941,212 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,500,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,694 - Alexa Ranking.

8  mixx.com

16,005,000 - Inbound Links | 879,108 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,200,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 645 - Alexa Ranking.

Make it easy

Social Marker is a fully automated tool that allows you to type in the details (name, url, tags, description) of the post you are submitting to many bookmarking and social news sites.  You will need to have set up accounts at each of the individual sites first though.

Additional resources - Niche social news and bookmarking sites

List of Social Bookmarking Websites

http://knol.google.com/k/shital-jethva/-/1lch2budony0n/4#

50 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities

http://www.doshdosh.com/list-of-social-media-news-websites/

83 Social News Sites - Categorised By Niche

http://www.squareoak.com/blog/83-social-news-sites-categorized-by-niche/

List of Social Media and Social Networking Sites

http://traffikd.com/social-media-websites/

20 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites That Actually Work

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/do-follow-social-bookmarking-sites/

Other useful resources

Digg front page data - useful to see what sorts of stories are hitting the front page, plus lots of other insightful information:

http://socialblade.com/digg/diggfpdata.php

Link Attraction Factors Keyword Tool - Enter a keyword and the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword:

http://danzarrella.com/link-attraction-factors-keyword-tool?word=free

LAF Title Check - Enter a title and the tool will break down the words and display the effect they had on the link accumulation of popular Digg stories:

http://danzarrella.com/laf-title-check

— Andy Merchant