How important are social bookmarking sites

[casper434]

How important are links from social bookmarking sites from an SEO perspective?

[AlanMosley]

every one says they are important, but once again i will give you my opinion only.

I have a face book account, because i wanted to find old friends, i dont have a twitter account, and i find every other aspect of facebook, besides finding old friends anying and child like. I aam 48 years old, i think many people in my demographic would also think like me. So to me, it is a only a signal from a certain demographic that social media speaks for, and can only have a limited value.
If social media was the only factor for arguments sake, then a search for Paris, would bring a back a full page of articles on Paris Hilton, mmaybe on page five you may have the city paris, you would not find any reference to the Paris of greek legend.

so i have doubts about social, it may be that the people at Bing and Google ae smart enouth to know when to use the signal and when not to.

[RyanKent]

How important are social bookmarking sites

Responses to such a general question will likely be highly variable in nature. There are some websites which gain almost no benefit from social sites, meanwhile there are other websites where social sites are a huge direct benefit to the site's success and profitability.

There have been many articles written on this topic. The most important points I would share are:

• It is important for you to control the social site usernames associated with your niche or company. What happens when another person or company begins sending tweets or publishing facebook pages with your company name on it? A lot of confusion may be created in the marketplace. It is very important to at least control the social accounts directly associated with your business.

• Simply owning a social account is not likely to provide much of a benefit to your business. It is possible a few people will learn about your business simply by having the account, but the overall effect will be small.

• If you own and actively use the social accounts related to your business, and you successfully encourage your site's users to engage in activity, the benefits are huge. There are some sites which have built entire stores on Facebook (as an example) where they earn a significant amount of sales directly on facebook. Twitter has been shown to drive a huge amount of traffic to websites. Some studies show social influences are stronger then any other factor, including links.

[AlanMosley]

I would generly agree, if you have somthing that goes viral, it can bring you some love, but i can only see that happaning in a limited number or areas, i cant see it working for real estate. i do hear of a lot of things going viral, but I always think, how are you going to turn that exposer into sales. Most things that go virual are purly social in nature and not convertable.

[RyanKent]

One example of a real estate facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/JamaicaPlain

This page has over 4k followers and when information is shared on their wall, there is a decent amount of activity. This particular site doesn't post much, but it is a quick example I located.

ActiveRain is the social network specific to real estate. Otherwise if you created a twitter account and shared tips, specific listings people were interested in for a given niche, and so forth I can see that twitter account growing into a large following.

There is definitely huge potential not only from a pure SEO standpoint, but from a marketing perspective as well. Just today a friend shared on Facebook he moved into his new house. He shared pictures, talked about the first time buying experience and so forth. He didn't go into details but if he did, he could promote his real estate agent, loan company, title company or any other aspect of what he liked or disliked about the experience.

[AlanMosley]

I had a look, i was suprised to see 4k followers, nut on closer look, all the commenst i looked at were from other realeaste agents spamming with there own pitch.

some of the likes looked a bit fake, i ma not convinced that it will convert into sales. i would expect customers to be asking what soort of hot water system does it have, when was it last inspected for termites, that sort of think, the only commenst that did not seem to come from RE agents, were like "I wished i lived in Boston, nice house, Wow" Look to me like the staff have posted commenst to make the home look good.
But it may help his rankings, but how many real estate pages have this following, And i still can not see any of these going viral.
I did a bit fo a search and most had either no like or single figuers, i would not spend too much time on it, hopping that my page may the one of the lucky few. I would be doing a lot of others things first.
Another one we will have to agree to diagree on

[casper434]

some great points made here to think about. Would these same thoughts apply to a social bookmarking site like diigo.com? The inference from the SEO article I read was that a site like this has high authority and pr and a backlink would be worthwile. I just do not see how this would be so given that the site is not related at all to real estate?

[RyanKent]

I don't have experience with Diigo so if others can share their feedback it would be helpful. You also may want to ask as a new question if you don't receive a quality response.

I like the idea of social bookmarking. The problems are the same as search engines, too much spam and manipulation. If a group has a high quality editor who ensures results are spam free, there can be great value in finding lists of quality links.

[casper434]

thanks Ryan I will do as you suggest