Definition of community: a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society; a unified body of individuals.
A community can be made up of a variety of people, businesses and services; neighbours, friends and acquaintances. Your social network can reflect the same mixture of people and interests.
Though social media may be the future for advertising – especially in small businesses, many entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t know a lot about it or where they or their employees can learn more about putting these tools to use. There are a multitude of online resources to help both you and those who work for you learn more about building a business through online media.
Geekpreneur has an excellent eBook, A Geek’s Guide to Promoting Yourself and Your Online Business in 140 Characters or Less with Twitter, for download, that will give you all of the information you could possibly want on using Twitter.
Another Twitter Guidebook, this one from Mashable. Starts with the basics and goes from there. Just reading this one book alone should be all you need to set up your Twitter account and use it in the most effective way.
Facebook 101 at LearnFree will help you with the basics of setting up a Facebook account and also guide you through the setup of those important privacy settings.
If you are going to sign up for one RSS feed or email newsletter, I would suggest the Social Media Examiner. It has social media how to’s and tools galore and has been a big help toward my re-thinking of how our blog is set up and the information it contains.
Chris Brogan’s list of 20 free ebooks about social media. I still haven’t decided which is my favorite and you may just want to read all of them!
My favorite find was this LinkedIn guide for the beginning user. There aren’t many guidebooks around on using LinkedIn but this SuperGuide list by Interactive Insights Group is useful in teaching you just how LinkedIn can help you with your business, job search and/or brand building.
Have you any great finds for helping others join the social media community? If so, we’d love to hear from you.
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image courtesy of DonkeyHotey
