Ever since I started using multiple browsers in my daily work life, I have been a big user of FURL. FURL is a social bookmarking tool which enables me to bookmark Web pages and access my bookmarks in whicever browser I happen to be in. I know I could have found some way of synchronizing bookmark lists across browsers, but say I stated using a new browser, ensuring that the bookmarks were synchronized would have been a headache. Not so with FURL. It doesn’t matter where I am (on my computer or someone else’s) or which browser I happen to be using, I simply log in to FURL and I can see all the pages I have bookmarked. One of the things I really like about FURL is the ability to create as many categories as I need and to assign one or more categories to each bookmark. I now have 1.138 bookmarks and so categorization is a necessity.

There are some social media aspects of FURL that I have not yet began to explore, such as subscribing to other people’s FURL lists. This will be fun for another day, but I think it is fair to say that while FURL is very useful it doesn’t have the same social media benefits to your SEM efforts as do Digg or Stumbleupon. In a nutshell, you are allowed to ‘digg’ or ’stumble’ of of your own pages, provided the page is genuinely going to be of interest to other readers. The net result can be a significant increase in traffic.

I use both Digg and Stumbleupon, however I recenlty renewed my interest in Stumbleupon when I started using its Firefox Stumbleupon toolbar plugin.

By clicking the Stumble! button you get a Web site that other stumblers have recommended based on your expressed interests. This is a really easy way to find a lot of high quality sites that you might not have otherwise found. Having looked at a page you can click the thumbs up or thumbs down icons depending on whether you liked the page. This feedback helps Stumbleupon find the really good sites for other users.

Of course you can stumble new sites that you found by yourself, but the Stumble button is a great way of spending the occasional spare five minutes and can be very educational.

Filed under: SEO, Social media by Martyn Whittaker