I have discovered 10 Top Reasons Why Baby Boomers SHOULD NOT even think about using Social Bookmarking. You may disagree with me and that is your blogging boomer right but let me know why. So, here are my reasons:
Blogging Baby Boomers have a hard enough time blogging and posting in social networking sites like Facebook and Orket, so who has time, during pre and post retirement, to post to social bookmarking sites?
Most baby boomer bloggers only blog to entertain themselves or for therapy. Who cares about promoting an expertise, service or product when most of them are fishing, or baby sitting grands?
Social bookmarking sites are a waste of time when all you have to do is use the FAVORATES in Internet Explorer and BOOKMARKS in FireFox. ( Who caresabout Safari or Opera, etc because most boomers are on PC’s right?)
Baby Boomer Bloggers are not as smart as the generations before them. They will have a hard time keeping up with the passwords to all those extra sites.
Most Baby Boomer Bloggers can’t see the SHARE BUTTONS.
It has been said by critics of baby boomers that they are selfish. So why should the want to share good information, articles, products, music,videos, etc with others in their friend networks that they find on other bloggers sites?
Who said Baby Boomers had friends. If they join a network who will they talk to?
Most Baby Boomers no longer say “Hey can you Dig it?”
Aunt Bea, in Andy Griffith, Macgyver or the Snurfs never used social bookmarking.
Baby Boomers probably came up with those strange and scary names for the social bookmarking sites like the ones below. Who will trust those sites to be for nerdy boomers, scholars, business folks or artists?
If you disagree with me GREAT!! Join me on my Facebook Fan Page and let’s continue the discussion. Also, I dare you to join at least three(3) of these sites. Let’s work on it together.
Do you have a SHARE BUTTON on your blog? Regardless of the blogging platform, most blogs use some kind of SHARE BUTTON for social bookmarking. SHARE buttons enable you to easily bookmark a blog post on various social bookmarking sites.
There are many services that will give you a button for your blog. I am going to list a few below. Before you decide on a service check the following:
How many bookmarking services do they provide?
Is the menu user friendly for your visitors?
Provide customization options?
Tracking?
Plugin or widgets for which blog platforms?
Are the buttons big enough for your visitors to see? (This is a real concern for me. I like bigger size for those who do not need to strain their eyes.
Here are a few SHARE buttons for your consideration.
I am challenging each and every baby boomer blogger reading this article to start step by step venturing into social media. After all, do you remember when you first started thinking about blogging? Did it appeal to you or did you say, “Too Much Time”.
All I want you to do is download the Share This plugin if you are on WordPress.org. Or if you are on Blogger, Typepad or any other blogging platform explore the sites above that will provide a SHARE button on your site. Please consider so we can all get more traffic. You wouldn’t mind having more traffic to your site do you? Ah, I think I heard a resounding YES!
When I first started using Digg I would merely sign in to be able to Digg an article I liked. But like most baby boomers reading this post, Sometimes you want to go deeper so it makes sense. You also go deeper so you can see how relevant it is to your blogging.
Here is Wikipedia’s definition of Digg.
Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.
Digg is supposed to be one of the best ,biggest and baddest social bookmarking sites out there right now. If you know how to treat it, you can get amazing floods of traffic regularly. However using just their homepage and simple techniques like I have done aren’t enough.
Some Applications to Consider that Can Help You Go Deeeeeeper into Digg.
Just like Google has labs so does Digg, The labs provide a deeper view of Digg. A lot of materialf gets submitted to Digg every day, so good things can sometimes easet past you. Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community’s activities. Here you can find several tools to make browsing and digging more fun as well as analyze internet activities. Oh, if you want to get to it from the site just go down to the very bottom and you will see it in tiny letters. Put your glasses on.
So, I just checked out Swarm. Very cool. Go play for minute or two.
Now this application is not for the faint of heart. Actually, if you have a little anal retention going on or simply love analysis you are going to love this tool.
This application provides detailed analysis, graphs and statistics allowing You to understand how many comments, diggs, friend diggs etc. are needed to hit digg front page. Analyze, what’s really happening on digg’s front page.
Now, you can go and play here for some more minutes. I will discuss some more applications in the next post.