Save Time With Bookmarklets

Curating and sharing content can quickly become time consuming, but is more important than ever as social and SEO become ever-closer bedfellows.

Bookmarklets can save you time, sharing pages with one click – avoiding the tedium of firing up a new browser tab for each network or finding an on-page social button. They look like bookmarks in your browser's bookmark bar or folder, but are in fact are small pieces of Javascript that help you get things done more quickly.

Most of the major social networks have official bookmarklets you can add to your browser:

Facebook Share OptionsTwitter BookmarkletStumbleUpon BookmarkletTumblr BookmarkletPinterest "Pin It" ButtonLinkedIn Button

Google+ doesn't have an official bookmarklet (yet) but Digital Inspiration have created two – one to +1 a webpage, the other to share to your Google+ Circles.

You don't have to use these bookmarklets to share to your own networks of course – if you're logged in as a brand you manage social activity for, you can post as that identity. It's worth checking "who" you are logged in as before you post, to avoid sharing irrelevant content to the wrong audience.

Bookmarklets are useful for a lot more than social sharing. Many of the "reading list" sites that help you curate lists of articles to go back to or view them in a "magazine" format on your tablet or phone also have bookmarklets – ideal for adding to your browser. Readability and Instapaper are just two examples.

Many note taking services also offer a bookmarklet (e.g., Evernote and some blogging software and hosting solutions). For example "Press This" allows you to quickly post to a Wordpress blog, and Blogger.com has a bookmarklet called "BlogThis!".

There are many other bookmarklets out there – page translations from Microsoft, URL shortening with Bitly and lots of other uses. There are a few sites listing them:

100+ Useful Bookmarklets For Better ProductivityLifeHack 20 Bookmarklets32 Indispensable Bookmarklets for Web Developers and Designers

Many sites also list them in the "tools" section of the site, often linked to from the homepage footer. If you find the bookmarklet you need doesn't exist, create your own – Matt Cutts, Better Explained and Smashing Magazine all have tutorials explaining how.

Image Credit: Sean MacEntee/Flickr