Social Bookmarking- How much is too much?

It seems like lately when land on some blogs, you are faced with a plethora of buttons and logos, many of which are for Social bookmarking sites . Social bookmarking sites offer a location for users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. They are also a place for bloggers and website owners to promote their site, usually free of charge. The idea is the other people will see their 'bookmark', click on it, and land on their site. The hope is that the visitor will then fall in love with their site, tell everyone they know about it and your site will get 10,000 hits a day because of one bookmark. With 10,000 hits a day, you cannot help but make money in advertising.

Here is a reality about social bookmarking.


First of all, the people using them are mainly the people wanting to benefit from their use. Otherwise, having to sign in to a service to locate your bookmarks can be a pain for the average computer user who has bookmarks easily saved via their toolbar.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of social bookmarking sites. It would probably take you a year to to sign-up, sign-in and list your site. The energy and time spent would have been better used by actually spending the money to advertise via Google AdWords.

Another downside, just how many logos and buttons can you have on your site before your site appears cheapened? Does the average visitor even know what all this means?

There are benefits to these sites when used in moderation.
You can get a few new visitors. You have to hope that someone looking for information has the time to log into their social bookmarking site and find you rather than just doing a plain old Google or Yahoo search.


Some people believe that bookmarks can show how a site is perceived when these sites allow voting. Social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines. Social bookmarking can also make you, the author, look up to date and thus, an expert in the eyes of the lay visitor.

Yes, you should use social bookmarks but, in moderation. Anything more than 3 or 4 buttons or logos is probably too much to add to your page. Especially when you are adding all of the elements that tell the world how popular your site is.