Last week, I received a nice note from a small business owner who reached out to me to ask questions about attending BlogWorld. She’s kind of old school with their marketing and P.R. and she was asking me the benefits of attending such an event to learn more about social media. As we talked, she also asked me if I can direct her to some how to’s and tutorials from around the web. This isn’t the first time someone asked me “how to do social media.” Because most of my online connections are web based, I take for granted that everyone knows this stuff. Offline, however, most of my friends and family don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.
As I gathered some online resources together to help this small business owner, it occurred to me that folks researching social media on the web might be looking for social media tutorials and how to’s as well. While I know the majority of you probably don’t need this stuff, I’m guessing that many, like my new friend, will come across this information via the search engines and find it useful.
Some of these items are here courtesy of the top names in social media, others are resources that I’ve bookmarked over the years. They may not be well known but they’ve been helpful to me. This isn’t a “top 25″ list. Everything on this list is here simply because I find them useful, and not because they’re the most popular resources. I hope you find them just as useful!
Behold, in no particular order:
25 Social Media How To’s, Resources, Tutorials and Lessons
1. Social Media Examiner: Mike Stelzner’s blog just sort of exploded out of nowhere last year. Every day Mike and his top notch contributors offer incredibly useful tips, videos and how’s to’s. Especially useful are all the video interviews with the pros.
2. Mari Smith’s Facebook Resource Page: Mari Smith is referred to as the “Pied Piper of Facebook” for good reason.
3. Jason Falls Slide Share Page: Jason presents on the topic of social media on a regular basis. If you truly want to learn from the best, bookmark Jason’s SlideShare page and take advantage of his presentations. You don’t have the benefit of having a personal presentation, but you can take advantage of the self-explanatory bullet points.
4. Social Media for Non Profits – The Case Foundations has compiled a stellar list of resources from around the web.
5. Social Media in Plain English: A simple, easy to understand explanation of social media and how it’s used, via CommonCraft.
6. Social Media Resources and Conversations: The Bay Area Social Media Consultants put together a list of the various social media tools complete with instructions on how to use them to your advantage.
7. Top 10 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube: Social Media today does all the work for you. If you’re confused about how to use Twitter for both business and pleasure, you won’t be after checking out these videos.
8. 20 Free Ebooks About Social Media – Chris Brogan’s list is from 2008 and not quite as dated as you might think. If you’re looking to learn about social media, you’ll definitely want to add this to your resource list.
9. 5 Tips for Getting Execs on Board - From Mashable, something many marketing teams struggle with is how to get approval for social media campaigs.
10. Website Magazines Top 50 Social Media Resources: A list of the Top 50 social media tools for you to check out. #1 isn’t what you think.
11. The Social Media Case Studies Super List: From the Interactive Insights Group. It’s not enough to talk about social media, the proof is right there in the pudding.
12. 50 Ways to Use Social Media: Another older list, but the tips are still relevant, from Jeremiah Owyang.
13. 100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner: Learn about everything from mind mapping to podcasting from this super list put together by Colleg@Home.
14. Essential Social Media Tools for Small Business: A listing of some of the more popular social media tools and networks and how they can help grow your business.
15. Social Media Goverance’s Database of Social Media Policies: If you’re looking to create your own social media policy, start by researching others to see how different businesses handle their campaigns.
16. The Twitter Guidebook at Mashable: Everything you wanted to know about Twitter but were afraid to ask.
17. 35 Social Media Tool that Will Make Your Life Easier: From Freelance Folder – especially useful for the self employed.
18. How to Use Social Media…Succesfully: Lynn Terry’ s tip are practical and spot on.
19. Twitter in Plain English – Another terrific explanation from CommonCraft.com.
20. Social Media Marketing in 3 Minutes: Helping small businesses to use social media tools. From upsidedowniceberg.com.
21. Top 8 Ways to Use Social Media via Lewis Howes.
22. How to Use Social Media: Everything you wanted to know about social media in Q&A form – via Open Forum.
23. 50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media to Improve their Marketing: I can’t argue with anything on this list of tips from Chris Brogan.
24. How to Use Social Media to Acquire New Customers - This “how to” from Business Pundit offers simple but useful tips for bringing in new business.
25. LinkedIn Super Guide: Tutorials, Tricks and Tools – We usually talk more about Facebook and Twitter for social media, but don’t overlook the importance of LinkedIn. Thanks to Robin Broitman for this excellent list of LinkedIn resources at the Interactive Insights Group Blog.
Do you have any favorite blog posts, articles, videos or tutorials to share? Open comments today – feel free to drop links to your favorites (but please don’t be spammy or I’ll have to get into delete mode.)
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What an awesome list Deb! Like I don’t have enough to do today!
Actually, I was looking for something to browse through and I found more than I bargained for!
Thanks so much Deb for mentioning Social Media Examiner. We have a way of just exploding out of nowhere a lot
Mike
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