20 social media resources you need to keep pace with the industry

Social media is a rapidly changing industry. You can be a skilled social media marketer or an enthusiastic newbie that has social in their blood, but keeping up with the changes is highly important for your work.

What is more, you can't think of social as a separate world with its rules and trends, but you'd rather think of it as of an integral part of internet marketing process.

In this article I'm going to share some resources that I personally use for getting most of necessary information about social media.

Official blogs of social media networks

If you use a particular social media network, I highly recommend reading its official blog.

Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn blogs are recommended to read even if you don't use these largest social networks. It is needed for overall understanding of processes going on in the industry.

Websites on social media

1. Social Media Examiner – in-depth tutorials, helpful tips, detailed updates description

www.socialmediaexaminer.com  - This website is a great collection of extremely useful content about social media. Tutorials, explanations of the latest changes and helpful tips can be found here. In fact, if you are a newbie, Social Media Examiner appears to be a great study book to get into the depth of rocket social media science.

2. Mashable – social trends, celebs and happenings

http://mashable.com/category/social-media/  - Mashable social category is about "the latest happenings in social media, plus tips on using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and other social tools on the web", as they say about themselves. Here you can also find information about latest social trends and celebs on social, tools collections and more.

3. Forbes – analytics, social media market news

http://www.forbes.com/social-media/ - Forbes social media category is more about analytics, connection with the marketing niche and economy, thus, many articles are also worth reading to understand the situation on the market.

4. BuzzFeed – social trends

http://www.buzzfeed.com/  - You can say it's more like an entertainment website and shouldn't be included. It is. But BuzzFeed does real journalism and collects things that are really popular on the web and are talked about. As a social media manager you should be aware of trends, jokes, memes and feel comfortable when talking about them. And using them in your work!

5. Razorsocial – social media tips and tools

http://www.razorsocial.com/  - It's a blog by Ian Cleary, a well-known social media enthusiast. Also he is a writer for Social Media Examiner. Ian pays special attention to social media tools.

6. Virante – analytics, effectiveness and impact on SEO

http://www.virante.org/blog/category/social-media-2/ - This blog's author is Mark Traphagen, who writes very deep articles, focusing on effectiveness studies, the impact of social on SEO and other analytics topics.

Some more links! They can overlap each other but still you'll find some additional info while scrolling your RSS feed.

7. HuffingtonPost - tutorials, news and marketing stuff

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/social-media/  - Like Forbes, HuffPost is good when you need to go through social marketing news and its connection with the economy.

8. Entrepreneur.Com - tips, news and using social media for business

http://www.entrepreneur.com/socialmedia/index.html  - This is a great resource to know more about using social media for your business.

9. Econsultancy - tips, tutorials and case studies

http://econsultancy.com/by/topics/social - These awesome guys share great articles about how different companies and projects use social as a part of a digital campaign.

YouTube, Scoop.it, SlideShare – popular niche videos, decks and articles

1. Besides following official YouTube accounts of social media networks (like one from Twitter) have a look at Ignite channel.
2. Once in a while I check popular presentations on Slideshare – just search for niche keywords and sort the results by popularity.
3. Speaking about Scoop.it, I think searching for trends is more useful here compared with following specific boards, but there are some decent niche boards by professionals that you may want to read. This resource is helpful if you got tired of the same shared articles in your timelines, and it's a great place to find some not very popular but still pretty decent articles and tutorials.

Reddit – popular articles and discussions

1. This Social Media subreddit is pretty much useful for reading.
2. Also you can have a look at the Webmarketing one from time to time.

Your social timeline – all-in-one source!

You can read certain people on social – SM professionals often post valuable links and related stuff. Build a circle of pro people that tweet news you like. A solid choice of Twitter users can replace a whole world of social media news resources.
What is more, use Twitter lists. For example, you can find social media influencers in this collection of Twitter lists by KISSMetrics. You don't have to follow all of them at once, that's why Twitter lists are handy.

Hashtags – trending articles on Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook

It's great to read news, but it's greater to know what people are really talking about.
So when I need to look over the activity in the niche and see what people are really discussing and sharing, I like to research what is happening under certain hashtags.
Remember that you can use it not only on Twitter, but also on Facebook and Google Plus. I frequently use #social, but I advise to check the hashtag activity you want to research using hashtags.org or any other analytics tool.

To sum it up

This collection is more like a base of knowledge you need to keep up with the industry. Also this list is a must read collection of resources for social media newbies and covers pretty much all segments of social media marketing.

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