Social Media Marketing for Business, Startups & Specialists

Learn how internet-based communities work and the social media mechanisms that drive marketing across platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, where tools change but core rules stay the same.

Explore how social media turns local news into a global footprint, creating information overload and media clutter as internet domains amplify voices across the web.

Explore networking in social media, focusing on utilitarian ties and expertise. Learn how online filters like google guide information and friends provide advice.

Analyze that LinkedIn is not a social graph but an interest graph mapping users' interests and hobbies through one-sided relationships, with overlapping interest graphs enabling predictions of others' interests.

Focus on Facebook's interest graph and treat fan pages as sources of interesting content, not as personal profiles, then share valuable info to engage fans and earn rave results.

Learn how Foursquare uses geolocation and context-aware computing to help businesses share location-based information with customers and encourage Foursquare marketing for restaurants, cinema, and pubs.

Learn how to market on Twitter by leveraging the interest graph, creating great content, and adapting your strategy to Twitter's one-sided following and news-driven network.

Learn how Facebook's evolving social graph lets you segment friends into close friends and acquaintances, build a personal brand with subscriptions, and share content with targeted lists.

Explore how your social graph maps to online tools and Facebook. Medical studies show close ties lower illness risk, and many Facebook friends reflect more social activity.

Discover how meaningful daily conversations across channels—face-to-face, phone, Facebook, or Skype—foster close relationships, emphasizing topics like work, fun, and common interests.

Discover how Dunbar's number bounds meaningful relationships to about 150 people and how Facebook and Skype help maintain those connections in everyday life.

Understand how social graphs move information, influence, and behavior for marketing. See how self-marketing products, like Polaroid and the iPod, leverage white earbuds.

Influence moves through a social graph and clusters, where friends’ choices shape buying behavior. Target clusters with nudges to like and share for viral marketing within communities.

Counteract side effects of clustering by using randomisation and paid ads to reach beyond your cluster. Use Google AdWords or Facebook ads to access a broader audience with wider appeal.

Explore how influence and authority flow through a social graph, and learn how to build online authority in a social media context by publicly declaring your expertise.

Explore why Facebook dominates attention in the online economy, and how users spend more time on Facebook than other sites, making social media marketing essential in the attention economy.

Operate inside the attention economy by prioritizing stories that affect you and your friends, since such events gain attention and drive watercooler talk at work and home.

Explore how information overload spurred filtering methods as blogs formed a long tail, and how audiences seek curated blog news amid evolving social media filters.

Explore social news sites where users add news and pictures and upvote items to the front page, noting how Twitter embodies advanced information filtering.

Explore how Twitter acts as an information filter, delivering news via trusted friends and followed experts, so users rely on credentials and network trust rather than seeking stories themselves.

Learn how Facebook's edge rank algorithm prioritizes content from close friends and fan pages by affinity and social graph position, shaping what your audience sees in their news feeds.

Boost edge rank by encouraging likes, shares, and comments to improve your fanpage's visibility in News Feed. Deliver high-quality, interest-driven content that speaks to your audience and avoids self-promotion.

Learn to run a social media campaign by engaging with critics during a crisis, talk to bloggers, and keep lawyers out of social conversations to preserve informal dialogue.

Learn to troubleshoot PR problems on social media by monitoring the buzz around your brand, tracking conversations, and using tools to see what people say.

Show how a social media crisis can erupt from a parody ad about orangutan habitat loss tied to palm oil, highlighting weekend delays and the need to stay visible.

Identify what fans want from fan pages in the attention economy: entertainment, discounts, behind-the-scenes news, exclusive updates, and personalized ads, with a 70-80% entertainment mix.

Bust the myth that social media is free by recognizing time costs and the need for strategy, and learn to plan a time-efficient presence with tools to connect with fans.

Social media value cannot be precisely measured by fan counts; focus on interactions and conversations, and learn to manage your presence to predict which conversations lead to transactions.

Explore social media monitoring by joining ongoing conversations to gauge your brand's presence, whether well-known or budding, and learn how tools like Google Alerts—free with a sign-up—fit into this process.

Discover how Google Alerts helps monitor what people say about your brand by automatically searching for keywords and sending email updates.

Set up Google alerts to monitor new content by signing in, creating alerts, and refining queries with quotes. Choose delivery options, frequency, and results type to manage brand mentions.

Use Google Alerts while noting its web-focused limits, and combine it with other tools to monitor social media and brand mentions across the full internet.