When you’re juggling different responsibilities and managing sites day-to-day, it can be quite difficult to find the time to research or improve your knowledge about a particular topic. There are a lot of resources out there, but figuring out which ones are worth reading and which ones are best to ignore can be tricky when you have a limited amount of time.
So we decided to compile a quick list of resources you absolutely need if you want to get ahead, A lot of these resources will provide tips, tricks, advice, guides and thoughts that will have you thinking about social media in a different way. Covering the usual suspects (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.), the more advanced guides (SEO, blogging, viral) and everything else in-between, there’s content here that will keep you busy for days, no matter what your priorities are.
– The nine Facebook marketing tactics that will triple your fan base
– The ultimate Facebook marketing cheat sheet
– Three Facebook timeline marketing tips for success
– This Open Forum piece advises on the best times to post on Facebook and Twitter.
– If you’re looking for ways to improve your marketing efforts, Facebook’s Studio page is a valuable resource for marketing ideas and multimedia content.
– Also Facebook’s Learning Lab is also designed to help all marketers better use the platform as a marketing tool.
Blogging
– 70 of the best WordPress plugins to use for your blog.
– 10 must have WordPress plugins every blogger should know about.
– PaidContent offer five ways that you can make and monetise a niche audience.
– As with all things, Facebook has a page dedicated to numerous first-party plugins, if you want to add the like button or comments section to your blog, this is the place to go. So does Twitter – where the follow, subscribe, hashtag and tweet buttons are available – and LinkedIn too, with buttons sharing, member profiles, following companies and apply with LinkedIn to insert into your blog.
– Five new Twitter tools to boost your marketing
– Five ways to use Twitter for marketing that you might not know about
– The ultimate guide to Twitter marketing
– Everything you need to measure Twitter marketing ROI
– And this handy infographic (originally found on hbr.com) highlight the best type of tweets to send…and the worst.
Google & SEO
– Search Engine Land’s Guide to Google
– How to use Google+: A quick guide and thoughts
– The ultimate list of reasons why you need SEO
– The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress Sites
– Problogger put together a comprehensive list of blogging resources for those who are either getting started or want to improve their blog
– Learn the best SEO practices from the people who designed said search engine in the first place: Google. A comprehensive read that will have you coming back again when you want to brush up on your knowledge. Other guides worth reading include Search Engine Land’s SEO guide and SEOmoz’s guide.
– If the above guides are too dense for you, this is a more straightforward way of learning the best practises for SEO from Words In a Row, Website Helpers and WebConfs.com (The last link is useful as it provides you a scoring system to show which SEO practises work).
YouTube & Viral
– If you’re a beginner in making videos, YouTube’s editor will make sure you go from idea to video in the quickest time possible.
– Also, YouTube provides access to animation tools and effect plugins so that even if you don’t have a video to upload, you can create one within moments.
– YouTube & News: A New Kind Of Visual News
– Nine YouTube SEO tips to help you get a better ranking.
– The top five ways to help monetise your YouTube videos.
– Ten little-known YouTube tips and tricks.
– Six powerful YouTube SEO tips that nobody talks about.
– What makes something go viral? The Internet according to Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman.
– And Kevin Allocca’s gives his very own guide to viral
– The guide to generating leads on LinkedIn
– The marketer’s guide to LinkedIn
– Seven steps to building a business using LinkedIn
– IF you find yourself unsure of anything, LinkedIn’s own learning center is a great resource.
– Pinterest marketing for commerce and online stores
– Pinterest: An introductory guide for marketers
– The small business guide to Pinterest
– How to target a male audience on Pinterest
Mobile
– Mobile future is still rife with uncertainty, so here are Business Insider’s predictions.
– The value of Google Analytics for mobile
– 14 tips for making the most of the tablet for your business.
– The 100 best iPad apps
– The best Android apps out there
– Foursquare for brands and non-venues
– 5 Tips: How brands can use Foursquare to grow
– An advanced guide to using Instagram to build your brand
– Anthony Quintano’s guide to Instagram
Stats and Studies
– If you’re looking for user numbers or the biggest brands on any of the social media sites, Social Bakers should be your first port of call. 99 social media stats for 2012.
– Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land did a quick study and found that while sharing is much higher on Twitter and Facebook, Google+ is still worth the time.
– Twitter users hit ‘Share’ nearly 5X more than Facebook users
– How people spend their time online.
– How users adapt to changes on Twitter.
– At your service: how businesses are taking care of their customers online.
Marketing & Case Studies
– If you want a resource to the biggest marketing blogs in the world, the AdAge Power 150 ranks the best resources using tweets, likes, shares and search engine ratings.
– The big list of 150 Facebook pages case studies
– Twitter’s provide their own list of case studies, eight in total, for brands to get ideas.
– And we provided our own list of social media case studies that you need to bookmark.
– Case Study – How to use LinkedIn to land clients
– Ad Age’s survey offers advice to the unsure advertisers of Facebook.
– Facebook: Our ads do too work – just like any others – and here’s data to prove it.
Miscellaneous
– If you’re having problems understanding Google Analytics and how well your blog is performing, Google itself has provided a step-by-step learning guide, called the online conversion university, to bring you up to speed.
– The 50 most powerful people in enterprise tech
– Ruining illusions that large-scale data journalism can only be confined to big media
– How people spend their time online.
– Top 10 social media tips when commenting and responding to customers online.
– Can content curation help your marketing
– How to make a dead cat bounce on Twitter
– The most overrated social media metric
– The Who, What, Where, Why, When and How of Infographics
– Five ways to protect yourself in a multi-device, multi-platform world
