To say the world of social media is “expansive” is a gross understatement. Even the smaller subset of social bookmarking websites is exponentially larger than any single person can realistically use or incorporate into their daily social media To Dos. Four of the most popular social bookmarking websites are StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Reddit. Below you will find an overview of each site along with a list of what type of content works best on each.
StumbleUpon
Website: http://www.stumbleupon.com
Bills itself as:Â A discovery engine to find the best of the web.
Content Topics: Unlimited. Users now select a main category when an article is added to the StumbleUpon database and can add additional tags along with a review.
How you promote content:Â Users “Thumb Up” or “Like” an article to initially enter it into the database, but then both Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down can be given from there.
Other notes/features:Â StumbleUpon updated their user interface in late 2011. We’ve written multiple posts on StumbleUpon, its Toolbar and how to share content with other StumbleUpon users.
Digg
Website: http://www.digg.com
Bills itself as:Â The best news, videos and pictures on the web.
Content Topics:Â You must select 1 category from their provided drop-down list: Business, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, Offbeat, Politics, Science, Sports, Technology and World News.
How you promote content:Â Users “Digg It”. Diggs can be both up and down.
Other notes/features: Comments can be left on previously Dugg articles. Digg offers a “My News” tab where you can see stories that are of interest to you based on who you follow, stories you enjoy reading and trending stories.
Delicious
Website: http://www.delicious.com
Bills itself as:Â The world’s leading social bookmarking service.
Content Topics:Â Unlimited, though its homepage lists 13 categories: Arts & Design, Comedy, Education, Entertainment, Fashion, Food, Lifestyle, Music, News & Politics, Pets & Animals, Sports, Technology & Science and Travel. Plus a 14th – Uncategorized.
How you promote content:Â Once you have bookmarked at least 5 links, you can build a “Stack”. Each stack is given a name and a category, and once a stack is published, it can be both shared with others and followed.
Other notes/features:Â Delicious generates an RSS feed for each user comprised of profiles and stacks that user has followed.
Website: http://www.reddit.com
Bills itself as:Â The front page of the internet.
Content Topics: Too many to count. Reddit operates with hundreds of subreddits, each with its own category. Users can subscribe to as many subreddits as they’d like.
How you promote content:Â Each user-submitted link can be voted up (by clicking the up arrow) or down (by clicking the down arrow). A score is determined for that article using simple math: # of Votes up – the # of Votes down.
Other notes/features:Â Reddit seems to have a much more casual feel as compared to the 3 social bookmarking sites mentioned above. For example, a few of its subreddits include WTF, Aww and Today I Learned.
While all 4 websites are staking their own individual claim in the social world, these 4 popular social bookmarking sites have some commonalities, too. All 4 sites are populated by user-submitted links. All 4 sites allow you to establish a list of followers/following. All 4 sites have their own form of a button, bookmarklet or tool to use in order to submit a link to that respective database.
Do you social bookmark? Which site(s) do you prefer?
out of all of these which are the must haves?
Hi Liz,
thank you for this overview.
I use delicious for my bookmarks (the private ones, too) and stumblupon for discovering sites.
Now, I’ll try out digg. For the news I ususaly use feedly. Let’s see how it works.
Stig