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 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.
Articles I Found Interesting
There were too many articles to pin down anything I would consider their best. Here is a short list of some of their latest posts that I thought were interesting though:
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.
Twitter Introduces Twitter Offers: This Week in Social Media
This article talks about the Twitter offers and then mentions other news around the web including Amazon social buying, The Rise of Podcasts as Business Education, and more. Some have comprehensive infographics.
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
This article is filled with amazing examples of how to make the best use of images in your posts.
Signing up to the newsletter will get you a free copy of their Social Media Marketing Industry Report. It has 50 pages and 80 charts, and studies more than 2800 marketers.
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
Here’s a short list of what caught my eye from the latest posts.
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
For signing up to the newsletter you can get 4 ebooks:
- 52 Ways to Build Your Brand In Today’s Social World. It’s a 23 page PDF that includes tips for specific social media networks.
- 9 Ingredients For Dominating Facebook’s News Feed, Without Giving Them A Penny. This is a 20 page PDF that covers 9 strategies for Facebook.
- 50 Ways To Ignite Your Business Using Social Media. This is a 28 page PDF that covers strategies such as time management, and tricks and tips for each of the major social media networks.
- 23 Quick and Easy Ways to Get More Twitter Retweets. It’s a 52 page PDF with lots of well-made charts.
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
Just like the other blogs, I didn’t have to look far to find a handful of articles that interested me.
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
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.
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
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.
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
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.
Their Mailing List
Signing up to their mailing list will get you notifications when the blog is updated. You can choose daily or weekly emails.
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
Rebekah’s articles are very detailed and comprehensive. Here are a few of her latest articles that caught my eye.
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.
Shine Online – 10 Ways to Use Social Media to Virtually Crush the Competition. This is a 19 page PDF ebook that gives detailed tips with great examples of using social media in the most effective way possible.
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
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.
Articles I Found Interesting
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.
Picking Out One Article I Found Interesting
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.
Which social media blogs do you read? Did I leave out your favorite one? I’d like to hear about it in the comments below.
Article thumbnail image by Bloomua / shutterstock.com
Thanks Brenda for this info-packed roundup of social media influencers. I agree with Dustin that the WHY examples add a lot of value to the post.
There’s a reason why nearly all the major corporations spend millions a year to keep their web presence active and engaging.
Strengthening your image on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest lets your customers interact with you on an entirely new level.
Simply put, the longer you can keep your company in the heads of those motivated customers, the better the chance of them coming to YOU when they need your product.
Punchy Social Media can keep that online presence fresh, interesting and providing amazing value at the same time.
Wow! Thanks so much Brenda! I can’t tell you how humbling it is to be mentioned alongside these other great bloggers.
Great to see a few friends up there! Well done on the list Brenda– I especially love that it’s not just a list, but you gave examples of WHY you picked the. Awesome stuff!
There’s a ton of great social media blogs out there. Glad to see my buddy Mike made it to the list!
I was super surprised that Sandi Krakowski was not on your list.
http://www.arealchange.com/blog/
Her Social Media Business Bootcamp sets her in a league above the rest. She really doesn’t have any competition. Here is the link to her Social Media Business Bootcamp for anyone that is interested. http://www.arealchange.com/social-media-business-bootcamp/
I’m surprised http://www.jonloomer.com isn’t on your list.
Excellent article and review. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks so much Brenda for your wonderful write up and for including Social Media Examiner 🙂 as your top pick!
Thank you for including me in your article!
Thanks for the article, I read social Examiner and Use buffer for sharing ! New blogs will read it.
I enjoyed this article very much! It has the makings of a nice piece of evergreen content that I can continue to comeback to.
Thanks, for running down all these suggestions of links and sites.
Without further ado, great article, Brenda … and now I bid you adieu.
Whoa, Brenda, just wow. Every time I stop by to read a post it’s always chock full of useful info, but this post is great. I currently have some opportunities opening up to me that are going to require me to hugely expand my knowledge base in all thing -social media-, so this post and the blogs you’ve outlined are going to be a huge boost to me. I’m planning on signing up for a few of them at least. Thanks for compiling this. I’ll be sharing for sure!
Got to agree with Charlie – fabulous post and so many links to useful posts.
Just got to find time to read a few!
Great info. Thanks for the research and article links too!