Social bookmarking is one of the less talked about areas of social media, but it’s growing all the time as sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit continue to develop their facilities and their audiences. So what is social bookmarking and how can it help your social media strategy?

Social bookmarking sites allow internet users to organise, archive and search for resource bookmarks online. These sites catalogue the bookmarks of resources which users find interesting, helpful or feel the desire to share, but not the files themselves, creating a highly efficient resource which can be accessed from any computer.

This makes social bookmarking an excellent tool for collating approved resources for market or business research, but the real value is in the way it can disperse information on your company, creating a wide audience base with built-in social recommendations.

The great thing about social bookmarking is that users add comments, or meta-tags. These can be anything from comments to a rating of the article’s quality. Consequently, good and informative pages can be high-ranked and well disseminated via user feedback, rather than overly focusing on SEO. As the site is socially based, articles that thrive are passed onto new audiences, complete with a personal recommendation which can lead to a higher uptake of readership and better conversion rates of readers into customers.

A strong social bookmarking strategy can ultimately lead to more hits for your website and an increasingly strong reputation as an online thought-leader.