Social bookmarking websites are sites on which Internet users share their web pages, articles, blog posts, images, and videos. There are a number of advantages to submitting your content to one (or more) of these sites. For one thing, they help to increase your brand awareness.

The more people who have access to your great content, the more likely that your content will go viral.

These sites also help to get your blog posts indexed more quickly and increase your website traffic. Any SEO company will be familiar with this strategy and use it as part of its marketing strategy.

Popular social bookmarking websites

Let’s start with the big one (and one people might not associate with social bookmarking too much). Twitter is an excellent tool for this and you can achieve it in a couple of ways.

First, simply posting links, images, and content with your account means you’ll have technically bookmarked them. You could then go back through your account to find things again.

On top of that you can also use the ‘like’ button for certain tweets. Many people use that too bookmark interesting things they find and go back to them in the future.

Pinterest goes for the “show, don’t tell” approach to marketing, and with 70 million users, it has been very successful. Most of its users (80 percent) are women and 42 percent of US adult women online have an account.

Over half of daily users consult the site before making a buying decision in a store, and the average order for visitors referred by the site is $58.95.

StumbleUpon is one of the bigger social bookmarking sites. Whenever you bookmark something you can add extra details to is, such as what type of content it is and its subject.

It comes with a great toolbar to make this process simple. It also allows users to enter their own interests and be shown relevant content submitted by other people.

Dribble is an excellent (and beautiful) bookmarking site aimed at designers. Not only is this a great place for inspiration, it’s a great place to get traffic to your site if you’re a designer, or have a design team.

A nice idea for gaining some traction would be to encourage your design team to get involved. If they have some downtime, see if they’ll put something unique and interesting together to go Dribble. It’s a perfect way to showcase your team.

Pocket is a really nicely designed social bookmarking site. It comes with an app to Pocket stuff as you go, saving you returning to the site all the time. You can also search by interest to find interesting things.

This means adding your own content to the site offers an extra avenue for people to find it. With well over 22m users that’s not to be sniffed at.

Digg has changed a lot over the years. Previously it was more like Reddit where the front page was curated through the users of the site. Now this is done by editors, but it retains its bookmarking function.

Digg can be a great place to find new content and organise it through your profile. Be careful, it can get quite addictive though.

Reddit is the self-styled ‘front page of the internet’. Users submit links to stories, images or videos that they find interesting and other Reddit users can either upvote or downvote these submissions.

By upvoting, commenting, or downvoting, you can generate a list of bookmarked content. It’s also an excellent way to promote your own content. If you want to do that, check out our piece on subreddit analytics.

Slashdot runs user-submitted news stories (with appropriate links) on Linux, computer hardware, devices, games, cloud, mobile, storage, security, management, book reviews, and more. See submission guidelines for details.

We Heart It is a bit more specific. It mostly sticks to visuals – including images, GIFs and videos – alone and also acts as a social network too. But it now allows you to submit articles in a similar way to Medium. We Heart It positions themselves as a place to find inspiration.

The site has 45m users, so it’s worth looking into using it. You can submit your own stuff and see some nice levels of traffic come in.

Scoop.it caters to professionals, business and non-profits, and corporations. The site has well over 1 million registered users so while not the biggest site on this list, it’s still got a substantial audience. Choose from a free or one of the paid plans, depending on how many topics you want to post about.

If you are going to use social bookmarking sites as part of your marketing strategy, don’t ignore the ‘social’ part.

Do be a good online neighbour and “pin” other users’ content, RT other users’ content that is interesting, and participate in discussions.

The more generous you are, the more you will find that other users will return the favour with your interesting content.