What are Social Bookmarking and Social News sites?

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is the process that we do when we save a website, which content is interesting for us, in websites known as bookmarks, so every time we want we can go to this sites just having a computer with access to the internet, without need of download anything in one computer. Our bookmarks not only will available for us but also for other users that could see and follow our bookmarks. And, because of everything happens in the online ambit, it’s easy to share our bookmarks wit our friends and contacts.

What is Social News?

Social News is a bookmarking tool very similar to Social Bookmarking but made up by communities who make possible to users to bookmark news contents, but also relevant contents from blogs, interesting stories, etc, and images and videos as well.

Their typology makes them great sources of information, and also make them sites where to intervene in, comment and discuss the most important recent events.

Main differences between Social Bookmarking and Social News

Despite being very similar tools and with similar performances, there are important differences between them, which means that should be evaluated independently.

• The nature of the marked: it is the most notable difference between the Social Bookmarking and Social News, being the first one web pages, and news and relevant and current content for the second one.

• The length of the marked: a page may remain marked in a Social Bookmarking site so long as the user who has marked wants, while it marked in the Social News, to be mainly news, lasts for hours or days, until it is losing popularity.

• The way of socialize: Another significant distinction between the two social tools. While the Social Bookmarking sites provide users can share their bookmarks with their lists of friends and contacts, the Social News sites are not raised to share content with friends or contacts because the importance resides in being aware of what news or content is the most popular of the moment.

• The type of traffic generated: another important difference to make between Social News and Social Bookmarking is the purpose, from a commercial point of view, of the use made of both tools in order to attract traffic to our website. While the Social News, being a sort of popularity contest, we can get a lot of traffic very quickly –but with the risk of having a non quality traffic and non loyal traffic- Social Bookmarking gets traffic for a long term, as a user is getting more and more readers and scoring more and more pages. In this way, traffic that originates with Social Bookmarking will be, with certainty, more relevant and of better quality.