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The 12 Most Useful Social Bookmarking & Autoposting Tools for Your Blog
By Los Angeles Internet Marketing | March 16, 2008
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As bloggers, we’re always trying to encourage our readers to post our blogs to one of the many social bookmarking services… be it digg, delicious, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon or one of the myriad others. There are many different wordpress plugins for different social sites. The problem is that your blog ends up cluttered with all of those buttons, and it really gets annoying.
The solution has been the plugins that allow you to post to any or many of the social networks. Here’s an overview of all of the ones that I’ve found (with some of my lovely comments to boot). One of the most popular players - sharethis, has received $15 million dollars in funding!
There are 4 different questions to ask yourself when you look at the different plugins:
- How many social bookmarking sites are supported? Conventional wisdom would say that the more support you have for different sites, the better off you are. The only issue is that if you don’t have your blog setup right, you are just cluttering up the page, and people are probably less likely to bookmark the page anyway. Additionally, unless you have thousands of daily visitors, most people are not using the smaller sites, so you aren’t going to get much from them anyways.
- For Me or for You - can I autopost the content to my own accounts? This is an interesting twist on the mass bookmarking concept, where you can post your new blog post to all of your different accounts simultaneously without having to log into each site seperately.
- Does it Cost me anything? Most of the services below are free, but some of them do cost money. Given that there are alot of free services already available, I don’t know why someone should pay for any of the services any more? However, the paid services do come with extra features that make it worth it.
- Am I Wasting My Time - How Many People Really Bookmarked my post? Between me and you, the best way to know whether you are interesting the readers who pass by your blog is to see how many of them bookmark, digg, plug etc. your site. Some of the new services add the ability to track how many people bookmark your site, which is really cool.
- Browser Plugin or Website Addition? While the focus of this post is mostly on blog plugins for users (there are so many plugins for IE and firefox I’d die writing about it!), some of these services also have a useful plugin for your browser.
The 11 Social Bookmarking and Autposting Tools:
- Sharethis.com - support for any website, as well as plugins for other sites too, like typepad etc. It’s a very clean and unobtrusive button at the bottom of your blog post that has a drop down button that allows your visitors to choose to post to one of 14 of the most popular social networking sites. They have some really amazing reporting going on, and also a browser button / chicklet. (I currently use this one.)
- Addthis.com - According to compete they have the most users - with well over 500,000 monthly uniques! They have pretty much the same service as sharethis, but support more social networking sites. They also have stats reporting built in, but no browser plugin (and no $15 million dollar investment). Impressively enough, they are used by hundreds of news sites, including techcrunch and Time.com. My only problem with addthis is that the customization is a little on the technical side, and I have no interest in playing around with the code. On the other hand - it is pretty customizable.)
- Addtoany.com - They have the most extensive list of social networks, and I also kind of like the easy way they have a down button that lets your visitors choose to add your post to over 65 sites! They also have deals with an impressive amount of large content creation companies, like pcworld and AOL. Unfortunately, they don’t have stats - which really sucks. Also, if you click the down button (that I truly love) and move off of it to scroll down the page, the drop down menu closes, which is really annoying.
These three are pretty much in the same category, with wide adoption, an unobtrusive nice button on the bottom of the page, and wide adoption. Of these, I’m going to use Sharethis, as it’s the easiest to use. Also, Ben over at Limadang.com likes sharethis with the fewer options, as he found that his readers were only posting to stumbleupon and digg anyways - and some of the addthis sites were producing errors. (I find that I get alot of posts to sphinn.com (surprise surprise). Here’s the compete traffic comparison for the above three sites:
- Toprankblog’s Plugin - Beautifully simple plugin that makes it easy as heck to add a social bookmarking link to all of your blogposts, and the customization is extremely simple - you just choose your options, and the source code to your website or blog template. You can easily add or remove the sites you want to have displayed. Unfortunately, there is no website stats, and no browser plugin either.
- SocialMarker.com - This is another cool multi bookmark tool which supports 46 of the top sites (like it really matters!) that’s both a browser as well as a site plugin, probably the simplest to use, unfortunately though, there is no stat tracking.
- Sociable - One of the first and most popular social bookmarking plugin. I believe I used this for a while. This is a bit different than the others, as it has no drop down menu, just a number of cool icon links. (I like the defaut that has no dropdown menu.) example.
- Cuzimatter - This script also has a bit of a following, although the layout of the page had me a bit confused. You need to put in your URL and Title, and then it will create the link for you. However, I don’t like all of the code, and no wordpress plugin. Call me non-techie!
- Notable - Similar to sociable, it’s just a wordpress plugin, with no drop down menu, just the cool icons at the bottom.
- Onlywire - This Autoposting Plugin Rocks! Seriously. I’ve been using this for ages. You can autopost to your own site through the browser or the blog / website plugin. It has an API for any of you techie people, and is really cool all-in-all. Unfortunately, I had to deactivate it as it has been getting a little quirky with my blog, but I do intend to figure out the problem and fix it, ASAP.
- Social Bookmark Wordpress plugin - This is another bookmarking plugin for wordpress. I don’t like the fact that the icon is very simple - there is no color, and that would probably impact the amount of people actually using it. I think that needs to be changed in order for the plugin to be viable.
- Autosocialposter - Costs $197 . When I first looked at it, I was skeptical, why’s it worth $197 when I could just use Onlywire? However, looking closer, I’ve noticed that it randomizes the posting and keywords used, which is pretty cool. It makes it more natural, and less obvious that it’s all automated. In addition, Michelle Macphearson, creator of the plugim wordpress plugin, also uses it.
- web2submitter - Costs $47. This has a cool twist to it. Instead of doing automated social bookmarking, it is a downloadable software that allows you to post more unique posts to all of the major social bookmarking sites, while making it very easy and simple to do so. I’m hijacking Jack and Brandons video, I hope they don’t mind
Click Here to order
That pretty much covers all of the really useful multi-bookmarking and autoposting tools and plugins that are available.
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Topics: search engine optimization, blogging, seo, wordpress plugins, social bookmarking, autoposting, blogs, web 2.0, Marketing Basics, Google, Coaching / Internet Mentoring, Company Marketing Techniques, Los Angeles Internet Marketing, social media marketing, Search Engine Marketing |
March 17th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Hi thanks for the plug..one correction its limadang.com and not limdang.com
thanks ya. keep it up great list.