The fundamental reason why consumers build social bookmarking profiles is to create an identity to share. After doing so, they are able to interact on social networking sites on a regular basis, and marketers can use this behavior to their advantage by:
- Monitoring their favorite brands
- Reading about new products
- Learning about competitor products
- Identifying with other users
- Seeing what friends and family find interesting
- Finding out what the latest trends are
- Identifying new products to purchase
In order to create a profile on many of today‟s leading social bookmarking sites, a user simply creates a screen name, login information, and possibly uploads a picture. Depending on the theme of the site, the user will then go ahead and „upload‟ the relevant information such as links or products to their profile pages. After that, they can become a part of a community.
Community members and leaders rise to the top „ranks‟ of the site based on a variety of factors including:
- Level of activity
- User feedback
- Number of products reviewed or discussions created
- Popularity within the community
- Number of fans
In many ways, social bookmarking is considered to be a form of collective intelligence. Collective intelligence based on a few trends in the marketplace, news, or other information can provide very important data to a third party observer. Filtering data has become even more important today as it provides insights and information on direct experiences with many of the goods and services available in the marketplace.