Social Bookmarking and Social Networking – Aren’t They the Same?

This is what most people tell me, especially people who are new to social media. Apart from the fact that they both start with the word “social”, they are two completely different things.

What I’m going to talk about in this post is to give you a better understanding of what they’re both about (in layman’s terms) to make it easier for you to understand (especially if you’re new to social media).

social bookmarking

Let me first talk about social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is where people come together to share websites, web pages, or news articles that they find interesting, newsworthy, or that they think the community would be interested in hearing about. Some examples of social bookmarking sites are the popular Digg, Propeller, Delicious, and Stumbleupon, where people come together and share their favorite sites or web pages. Registration to these sites is free (in fact, it takes less than 5 minutes to sign up for one) and you can start adding sites immediately after signing up.

Marketers also make use of these social bookmarking platforms as one of the means to drive traffic to their websites – if the website is interesting enough, this traffic generation method can help drive large volumes of traffic to your website.

Social media

Think of social networking sites as social functions you attend, where you mingle with people who have similar interests to you.

These social networking sites exist to allow like-minded people (from all over the world) to come together in one place to interact: all you need to do is sign up, create a simple profile (where you fill in some personal information, plus specify your hobbies, interests, favorite TV shows, movies, songs, etc.), provide a photo of yourself and you’re ready to go.

With these social networking sites, you can find people with similar interests and hobbies as you and make friends with them.

Examples of social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Marketers are also making use of these social networking sites to find potential customers and if used correctly (what I mean by using these social networking sites correctly is using them to actually help potential customers with any problem they with a combination of information and product recommendations, rather than simply spamming them with product promotions), these sites can help generate large amounts of revenue.

I hope that with the above article, you now have a better understanding of what social bookmarking and social media are all about, as well as the differences between each of them.