For the last few months I’ve noticed an interesting occurrence with Ghost Blog Writers.
The posts we publish get their fair share of retweets on Twitter and shares on LinkedIn, but especially on Twitter I’ve noticed some interesting activity. Instead of getting more retweets than favorites the posts have been getting more favorites than retweets.
I’ve never really put the favorite star on any tweet on Twitter so I thought this was interesting.
It kind of confused me because the way I use Twitter is to share information with people. If I read a great post somewhere on the web I want to share it. If someone has already tweeted it and alerted me to the article I’ll retweet their article.
But I’ve never been big on the favorite button.
Social Bookmarking
Bookmarking has been around long before the Internet. I guess the term means to save a page in a book so you can reference it later. Maybe you’re partway through reading the book and need to pick up where you left off.
Or maybe you want to save a page because you liked the passage and want to reference it again in the future.
When the Internet came along bookmarking was a natural occurrence for people. You could bookmark your favorite websites and pages. It made it easy to visit those sites without having to enter in the full URL every time.
I still do this today.
But social bookmarking is kind of different.
People started bookmarking articles, blog posts, videos and all kinds of content so they could reference it later. I did this for a while. I used Delicious, which I think is still around today although not as popular at least for the moment.
After a while, though, I realized I didn’t have time to go back and reference articles. I like reading new articles and rarely went back to reference something. So saving articles wasn’t worthwhile.
I’m pretty good at googling something and if I need to find an article I remember reading in the past I can usually find it.
The Evolution Of Social Bookmarking
When people started favoriting posts on GBW it made me realize that social bookmarking is still important today. And a lot of people do it more than I ever have.
Maybe that’s a sign I need to start saving more things. I don’t know.
But I guess I take it as a good sign that people are saving the tweets we share with our blog posts (and some with posts from others that we share).
If you’re doing things right with your blogging and social sharing you’re going to get a few social bookmarks. It could mean that you’re doing the right things with your articles because someone is saving it so they can come back and reference it later. I would think this is especially good when you create how-to articles.
The bookmark means you’ve provided something of value. That builds trust. It’s a sign that you’re early on in the sales process, but there is a strong likelihood of a sale down the road, which is what blogging and social media are all about.
Image: Flickr