One of the best things we can do as social media marketers is to continue our growth and share information with others. Blogs are great for this. They help us stay in touch with others like us. They help us learn from each other and they help us share our knowledge.
Social media advice is everywhere. With the many choices we have today it can be difficult knowing where to spend your time and effort in learning your craft and getting the latest news and tips. For this article, I have combed the net and found 9 of the best blogs out there right now. These are not the only blogs worth reading, of course, but these 9 blogs contain great information and advice for using social media to add value and grow your business.
So, without further adieu…to the blogs!
Social Media Examiner
Social Media Examiner from Michael Stelzner is an online magazine giant with a focus on using social media, blogs, and podcasts for business. Their focus is giving you advice on connecting with customers, driving traffic, generating awareness, and increasing sales.
They produce content almost daily, and sometimes several times per day. Content includes comprehensive articles, interviews with industry experts, case studies, reviews of the latest research, and news to help you improve your social media marketing. They make great use of images and text.
They produce a daily newsletter with over 300,000 subscribers. They also produce a weekly top 10 podcast targeted toward marketers and business owners to help them discover what works with social media marketing. Two popular conferences also got their start with Social Media Examiner: Social Media Marketing World and an online conference called Social Media Success Summit.
26 Tips to Strengthen Your Social Media Marketing
This is a comprehensive list of tips that include:
- Add Your Value Proposition to Profiles
- Create Targeted Calls to Action
- Encourage Blog Comments
- Fuel Profiles With Shared Content
- Manage Workflow
- Pay Attention to All Analytics
And that’s just a few of the tips you’ll learn here.
How to Design Social Media Images for Brand Recognition
Images help capture your reader’s attention. This article discusses the best ways to use images in social media to help with brand recognition. Tips include:
- Using watermarks
- Choosing fonts and colors
- Let the image do the talking
Boom Social
Boom Social is a marketing firm from Kim Garst that provides both free and paid content to help business owners, marketers, and managers improve traffic, engagement, conversion, and content. Their focus is on making selling through social media simple and affordable. They post several times per week.
They have several paid training programs that range from $9-67 that focus on Twitter and Facebook.
How To Double Your Email Subscribers in 30 days
All social network marketers need more email subscribers. This article covers 6 strategies for increasing your email subscribers. Tips include:
- Offer a 6-8 part training program
- Hold a contest
- Offer coupons, discounts, or freebies
Concerned With the Cost of SEO? Start with these FREE Tips
SEO is vital to doing any business online. This article discusses 4 tips to improve your SEO and lower your SEO costs. The tips include:
- Study your competitors
- Create a plan
The Ultimate Cheatsheet for Selling on Social Media
This is a comprehensive article with 11 tips for selling on social media. Tips include:
- Find leads using social media monitoring tools
- Use LinkedIn to leverage shared connections
- Create Pinterest boards to attract targeted leads.
- Send regular emails with valuable content, deals, and promotions
The Social Media Hat
This one from Mike Alton has articles on many topics including social media, blogging, SEO, marketing, tools and apps for internet business marketing, and technology. The target audience is business owners. Their posts are comprehensive and provide lots of valuable and relevant information.
Buffer Adds Brilliant Scheduling Piece for Bloggers
This article goes into great detail about the new Buffer scheduler, which is an update to the Chrome extension.
Special Symbols for Social Media Updates
This article shows you how to use special symbols within your text to spice it up a little bit. The post provides a massive list of symbols that you can copy and paste into your social media posts.
How to Create a Branded Short Link
This is a very comprehensive article that covers everything from what is a short link to using them with your social media services like Buffer, Hootsuite, SocialOomph, and Shareaholic.
Klout
The purpose of Klout is to give you advice on building, well, clout. They discuss subjects such as using social media to build your brand, blogging tips, business strategies, and more. They post a few times per week.
5 Ways Smart Marketers Accrue Social Influence
This article talks about finding online influencers for your brand. The tips include:
- Be Relatable
- Creative Content Drives Engagement
- Be a Connoisseur, Not A Band-Wagoner
These are great tips for interacting with your customers.
The Community ROI Equation: Engagement, Behavioral Change, Content
The ROI equation is very important information for your social media strategy. You want to know that what you’re doing is working. This article discusses how to improve your ROI through engagement, behavioral changes, and content programming.
Social Media Today
This one provides daily posts that focus on PR, marketing, and advertising primarily, and includes any other topics where social media is critical for success. Topics include social networks, marketing, technology, business, events, webinars, etc. They produce multiple articles per day.
There are so many amazing articles here that highlighting just a few is difficult.
21 of the Best Social Media Articles This Year
This article covered articles from around the web and included articles from Adweek, Venture Beat, Social Media Today, Social Media Examiner, Social Fresh, Search Engine Watch, Kissmetrics, Mashable, Entrepreneur, and many others. Topics include:
- 10 Smart Tips to Leverage Google+ For Increased Web Traffic
- 11 Unusual Social Media Tips to Drive Branding, Clicks, and Conversions
- 6 Simple Photo Tools for Creating Social Media Visuals
- 8 Brain Triggers Guaranteed to Boost Your Social Media Marketing
- How to Easily Double Your Traffic from Social Media
Why Your Content Marketing Needs to Tell a Story
This article talks about how storytelling affects the brain. It gives tips on how to tell a story in such a way to get a positive response from your readers. Tips on storytelling include structure, speed, sympathy, conflict, complexity, and conclusion.
Top 10 Marketing Techniques for Professional Services
This article covers marketing techniques to bring in new business, targeting promising leads, building your brand, and driving faster growth. Tips include:
- Specialization and niche targeting
- A lead-generating website
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Develop a signature piece of content
Users can sign up for an account and post content, creating a social network within the site.
Buffer Social
Since this one is from Buffer, you would think their blog would just focus on Buffer, but it covers virtually everything about social media. They post several times per week and cover a wide range of topics and social media networks.
We Tested All the Best Advice to Get More Clicks on Facebook. Here’s What Worked
This one put the Buffer app to the test using 7 common Facebook marketing tips to see what would happen. The tests included:
- Post to Facebook at non-peak times
- Engage your fans by asking questions
- Post different images as links
- Change the style of the update
Each test included an analysis of the results.
39 Blogging Tools to Help You Work Faster, Write Better, and Land More Readers
This one gives an impressive list of tools that are arranged under topics. The topics include:
- Tools to brainstorm blogging ideas
- Tools to organize your ideas
- Tools to create well-optimized content
- Tools to help you write easier and faster
- Tools to create beautiful blog visuals
- Tools to distribute your content far and wide
- The blogging tools used at Buffer
Tools include Trello, Yoast, MailChimp, Google Webmaster Tools, Gimp, Grammarly, Google Docs, Dropbox, Evernotes, LinkedIn Pulse, Blog Topics Generator, Buffer (of course), and many more.
Rebekah Radice
Rebekah is a consultant who focuses on digital marketing, social media, and business strategy. She posts once per week on her blog on average, and provides detailed posts about using social media for business.
Smart Ways to Manage Time on Social Media
This article gives 5 tips to save you time while dealing with your social media efforts. One tip covers tracking your activities using tools like E.ggtimer and Rescue Time. Another tip discusses automating your posts using tools like Buffer, Post Planner, Do Share, and others.
Step by Step Guide to a Profitable Small Business Blog
This article discusses 6 steps to a profitable business blog. The steps contain many tips within them. Topics include finding your niche, developing your strategy, staying focused, uncovering your unique voice, and lots more. She’s added a nice infographic of all of the steps and information, too.
Peg Fitzpatrick
Peg is a social media strategist, author, and marketing pro. She shares her social media experience on her blog. Her posts are creative and detailed, and cover a wide range of useful topics.
9 Sparkling Ways to Make Your Online Brand Shine
This is a detailed article that covers 9 tips to help you stand out from the Internet crowd. The 9 tips include:
- Create your digital brand
- Find your niche
- Pay your dues
- Invest in yourself
7 Ways Social Media Supports Small Business
This article discusses how to best use social media for business. Tips include:
- Build a Credible Reputation
- Connect With Like-Minded Business Professionals
- Diversify Your Marketing Efforts
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is a well-known author that discusses many topics on his blog. Among them are blogging, marketing, entrepreneuring, social media, and much more. He doesn’t always post that often, but what he does post is insightful and well worth your time.
The Art of Evangelism
This article covers 11 points for using content marketing as an evangelism tool for your brand. Points he makes includes:
- Make it great
- Position it as a “cause.”
- Let people test drive the cause.
- Provide a safe, easy first step.
- Never lie.
He discusses why being an evangelist is better than being a salesperson. A salesperson is concerned with his or her own quota, whereas an evangelist is concerned with the interests of others. This makes sense to me. If we’re focused on helping others then we are more valuable to them than someone that’s just trying to sell to them for our own gain.
How to Use Twitter as a Twool
This is an older article that goes into a lot of depth about using Twitter as a marketing tool for your website. He gives 10 tips that include:
- Get as many followers as you can.
- Monitor what people are saying about you, your company, and your product.
- Ask for help.
- Create an email list.
- Make it easy to “post to Twitter.”
Bonus Round – One for Marketing and Business in General: Seth’s Blog
I wanted to step outside the box just a little and make a recommendation for a marketing and business guru in general: Seth Godin. His daily blog gives information about anything and everything to help you in business, but his primary focus is on growth, marketing, storytelling, ideas that spread, and work worth doing. His posts are usually short and easy to read, which is great for us busy folks when we want a quick tidbit or two. His thoughts on business are great for helping to shape your thinking and business mindset.
A three-step marketing ladder
This recent article that I found interesting discusses three steps to help build your marketing efforts: Awareness, Education, and Action. He are a few of the points he makes about each one:
- Awarenessis when someone knows you exist
- Education is the story we tell
- Action is the only step that the CFO is measuring
Wrapping Up
Well, there you have it: 9 blogs that contain essential reading about using social media for business. The web is aflame with social media blogs, and it isn’t possible the read them all. And of course some are more credible then others. Hopefully this list will help you decide where to place your saw sharpening efforts.
