8 Best Social Media Articles on the Web

There are a wealth of articles on the web about social media. But not all of them are written by experienced and skilled marketers. Many simply don't provide real value - actionable insights that you can apply to your business right away.
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2016-03-27-1459108485-7424118-Socialmedia.jpgThere are a wealth of articles on the web about social media. But not all of them are written by experienced and skilled marketers. Many simply don't provide real value - actionable insights that you can apply to your business right away. Below, I've curated eight of what I think are some of the best social media articles on the web. Each one is full of helpful advice from experts in the field with the experience to know what works and what doesn't.

A solid social media strategy lays the groundwork for social media success - there's no two ways about it. This post outlines eight important elements of a social media strategy and each one is crucial for businesses to think about if they want to achieve the results they're looking for.

Some organizations jump into social media before thinking about how they're going to measure success, properly researching their competition, and/ or having a content strategy in place. Failing to do any one of these things is a big mistake because it sets them down a long, frustrating road where a lot of time is spent on tactics that are simply not effective.

Content and social media are inextricably tied together. Great content is a key component to success with social media. But sometimes it's hard to find the right content that will resonate best with your audience. With this post, you'll get a number of helpful tips on effective and in many instances, out-of-the-box, ways to source this content. BuzzSumo, which is discussed, is a search tool I regularly use to quickly see which types of updates/ subjects are most popular (as measured by social media shares).

Without knowledge of the right tools, social media can be unnecessarily time-consuming. This article highlights excellent tips - several which I personally use - to help you be more efficient on social media.

You'll read about Buffer, a system I use on a daily basis and one that helps me save a lot of time. Buffer lets you schedule all your social media updates in advance and ensure that you have the right mix of content, at the right times, on the right social channel. You can then see which updates get the most posts clicks, likes, retweets (and a variety of other measures) and subsequently reschedule those updates at whatever frequency you wish.

Facebook has adopted a "pay to play" model by showing each update a page posts to a small percentage of that page's fans (some estimate 5%). In order to get the reach you want for your updates, you'll likely have to invest some money.

For many organizations, Facebook ads deliver a good ROI and have been effective in achieving awareness, leads, and sales. In this post, marketer and entrepreneur Neil Patel outlines five important steps to ads that perform well. Neil's articles are often packed with great insights and this one is no exception.

One of the big benefits social media has to offer is that your content has the potential to go viral. Here, I explain tried and true ways to maximize the likelihood of this happening.

This article outlines what you can (and in many cases should) do to create a successful Facebook advertising campaign. There are a lot of posts out there on this topic but this one stands out because the author shares some excellent insights and shows you, step by step, how to easily implement them.

Social Media Examiner curated 20 social media marketing tips from leaders in the field. Prominent marketers like Guy Kawasaki and Joe Pulizzi discuss how they're using social media to get results. My favourite tips are #4 (maximize Twitter real estate with images) and #18 (create a social update library around each piece of content you create).

8. The Best 5 Minutes We Spend on Ads: See the Daily Ritual We Use to Boost Traffic to Our Best Posts

Buffer's Kevan Lee shares a great strategy for deciding which Facebook and Twitter updates to boost. Kevan and others in the field, including myself, have experienced positive results with this approach. It's important to remember though that one of the keys to success with paid social media updates is to continually test and see which ones perform best with your audience.

Most of us don't have time to sift through the millions of social media articles out there to discover which ones offer valuable advice and which ones don't. And many people don't have the knowledge and experience (yet) to determine if that advice is worth following. That's why I curated the list above. I recommend bookmarking this article as you may wish to come back to it for future reference.

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