5 Ways Social Bookmarking Will Make Your Job Easier

Table of contents:

• Collect only the best, most popular content.
• Perform research more efficiently.
• Keep your content organized.
• Say goodbye to manual search.
• Help your own content go viral.

Fall has officially arrived. But here in Charlotte, North Carolina, the weather is still warm enough that I think I can squeeze in just a little more of the Summer of Social Media for Nonprofits—at least until the leaves start falling.

Throughout this series, you may have noticed that HIGH QUALITY CONTENT is frequently mentioned as a key to social media success. Sharing high quality content on social media positions you as a valuable source of information—and that’s what drives people to follow and “like” you, and moves them one step closer to becoming your supporters.

But the challenge many nonprofit marketing directors face is this: How do I curate enough high quality content to maintain a steady presence on social networks? 

The solution is social bookmarking.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking allows you to find and collect the very best third-party content and save it for future use (such as sharing it on social media). 

Rather than bookmarking website URLs to your personal computer, you can save and access your links from any computer simply by visiting the social bookmarking website.

Each social bookmarking site is its own social network—users can vote on, comment on and share content.

Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites include:

• Pinterest
• Scoop.it
• Digg
• Reddit 
• Delicious
• StumbleUpon

By leveraging one or all of these social bookmarking sites, your job of curating content will become much easier.

5 Ways Social Bookmarking Will Make Your Job Easier

1) Collect only the best, most popular content.

Social bookmarking sites filter content based on several factors, primarily:

• Overall popularity (how many times people have bookmarked it) 
• Your favorite topics (if the platform you’re using allows you to select topics you’re interested in)

The social bookmarking site Reddit ranks content based on user votes:

2) Perform research more efficiently.

Don’t limit this powerful tool to simply helping you find content that your audience will find valuable. Find content that will be valuable to you, too! Use social bookmarking to search for the very best articles on a particular topic you wish to research, such as marketing for nonprofits, hiring tips or fundraising best practices.

3) Keep your content organized.

Most social bookmarking sites give you a way to group similar content together. Pinterest allows you to categorize your “pins” on different “boards.” Delicious calls these categories “stacks” and Scoop.it calls them “topics.”

When it comes time to pull content for a social media post, you can go straight to the right category (or board, or stack, or topic) instead of digging through your entire collection of bookmarks. 

My team created a topic on Scoop.it called Social Media Marketing For Nonprofits and used it to bookmark the posts from my Summer of Social Media blog series.

4) Say goodbye to manual search.

On some social bookmarking sites, you can choose certain keywords/tags to follow, and your profile will automatically populate with relevant content. This minimizes the act of searching, and delivers the best and latest content directly to you.

When you create a “topic” on Scoop.it (as mentioned in #3), you can provide keywords and Scoop.it will suggest relevant content that you might want to add to your topic. 

5) Help your own content go viral.

By bookmarking your own content and allowing it to circulate through a social bookmarking network, you can greatly increase the number of viewers it receives. Be sure to assign relevant tags (sometimes called keywords or hashtags, depending on the platform) to make your content easy for other users to find.

This is what it looks like when you add a link (a “New Scoop”) to your Scoop.it account:

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