Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarked resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, with specified people or groups, or other combinations of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites available in the U.S. If you’re including the rest of the world, that number more than quadruples.

Acquire new customers through social media referrals. Get your patients to refer others. Build this into every patient touch point and drive incremental revenue at the lowest acquisition cost. Why should you seek referrals from your patients? More than 75 percent of consumers today rely on their social connections to make purchasing decisions, including healthcare.

How can you drive new business through customer referrals? Reward referrals. Drive your incentive and promotional programs to create referrals rather than be a means to give something away. Your focus should be on bringing in new patients rather than being known as a giveaway-happy practice.

How can these referrals impact your business? Eighty percent of consumers belong to social networks and the average consumer has 50-100 connections (the younger demographic, 18-34, has roughly 300 connections). Getting consumers to refer people they know drives exponential reach and higher conversion rates. i.e. the more patients you touch in a positive way, the more likely they are to discuss and refer your medical practice.

Social networks are having an overwhelming effect on consumer behavior. More than 75 percent of consumers say they seek advice from their social networks before making purchase decisions. Over 600 million people use social networks every day. This is where they get their advice.

Medical practices, like most businesses, are acknowledging the benefits of referrals made by their patients. Many offer valuable incentives for these referrals, as an unspoken support of their quality and loyalty they evoke.

Here are several very strong bookmarking sites, in no particular order, to consider:

- ShareThis has a special feature which remembers what you’ve shared. So if you share a link on Facebook the service saves a log of the activity into your ShareThis account. It’s also available as a bookmarklet (a JavaScript application contained in a bookmark) and can be very useful for browsers like Chrome or those not supporting add-ons.

- SocialList.org spreads your content across the Internet by making it easier for your website visitors to share it with other people. Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links.

- Add To Any has a feature that detects social services used by your visitors and places them first inside the widget.

- mooSocialize is an AJAX-based social bookmark widget that allows you to integrate many bookmarks for every post on your blog, website etc.