
Social Media Marketing
Let's start with the basics, which can be used for any social media platform:
- How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch by Kevan Lee, Buffer Marketing Director. It's a comprehensive long-read about basic of making your SMM strategy.
- Case-study from Hubstaff: The Improved Social Media Content Strategy That Boosted Visits by 230%.
- Guide on Copywriting for social media: 10 Ways to Write Damn Good Copy.
- The Psychology of Social Sharing: How to Shape Your Content According to What People Want to Share via Canva.
📌 Useful SMM toolbox:
- When you have multiple Social Media accounts, use dashboards & tools for managing them in one place. My favorite ones are Buffer and Hootsuite (both have free options). These tools have built-in analytics. So you can pick simple metrics that are meaningful and can be analyzed.
- Pablo and Canva for fast creating of nice-looking images (both free).
- Nuzzel can show you the top content being shared among all your followers on Twitter and Facebook. You can use that content for sharing or as an example. It's free tool.
- Google Analytics Campaign URL builder for making UTM codes and here is a guide on Using UTM Parameters to Track Social Media Success from Hootsuite.
I love Twitter as a tool for personal use. Moreover, Twitter has a huge variety of opportunities to promote your product — personal account, company account, Direct Message Marketing, Chats, Adds. Twitter can be used for sharing your articles, connecting with influencers or looking for competitors' customers. As you see, it's a powerful platform for many marketing activities, depending on your goals.
Your personal account can drive traffic to your product and content. While growing your Twitter followers, you increase the media reach you might get. But don't forget, that Twitter is made for people. To be successful there, you need to communicate with your audience just as you would do offline. If your target audience like your tweets and your personality, there’s a higher chance they will trust you and click on your links:
- How to Get Higher Tweet Engagement? We Analyzed 23,858 Tweets by Karola Karlson. It's a long read about what, when and how to tweet. Although the main focus is on marketing industry, the key insights will be useful for tech as well.
- 8 Tactics for Increasing Your Twitter Reach by Patrick Whatman.
- Get More (High Quality) Twitter Followers by Stalking Influencers by Paul Shapiro.
- 5 ways to increase your Tweet engagements with emojis from Twitter team.
- Taking part in Twitter chats is a great way to attract new followers and actively participate in relevant conversations with people from your industry.
There is nothing wrong with automating your Twitter activities. You can schedule posts, automatically send messages and set up rules for auto-engagement with users. However, using automation only 🤖 will hurt your SMM strategy. So mix it with a real-time tweeting and being active & helpful with the community:
- I Automated My Tweets for 30 Days and This is What Happened by Tami Brehse. Tami scheduled 60 tweets with her blog posts for one month. Her overall site traffic showed how people actually engage with automated tweets.
- Twitter Deep Dive: How to Use Social Media to 10x Your Website Traffic (video) by Tara Reed. Tara shared a cool guide on building Twitter strategy and automating your engagement workflow. Clever automation is awesome 👌.
- How to automate Twitter content curation with RSS blog feeds. Jeff Bullas uses Dlvr.it for automation, this tool has a good free plan. Be aware, that simply spamming content to your social networks will not work out.
- The Pros & Cons of Twitter Automation by Michael Georgiou. Check possible downsides to know how to avoid them.
- Is “fake” Twitter following working? by Karola Karlson. New accounts suffer from a lack of followers. Follow-Unfollow tools seem like an obvious solution to give you the "first followers". But in most cases, it will be bots or inactive users.
Direct Message Marketing is about sending personal, mass or automated DMs to your followers. These articles will show you how to use this tool in a right way:
- 7 Twitter Direct Message tactics absolutely anyone can use by Paz Segura.
- Why Twitter Auto DMs are Evil (and what you should do instead) by Melissa Culberson. Melissa proves, that if you send impersonal auto-DM with some spam, that will only annoy your users.
- Case study when auto-DMs actually were working by Nik Nitro. Welcome auto-DMs should be used only when it provides tangible value to a new follower. Nik shows his example.
- Be aware of Twitter tweet & DM limit.
One more option to consider is Twitter Adds. My experience with Twitter adds was not so positive... especially when I set up the first campaign. So be ready to face poor UX, mysterious errors and bad customer support. Anyway, these guides will help you out:
📌 And these tools help you maximize your Twitter presence, from timing to sharing to the analysis:
- Buffer and Hootsuite for scheduling (were mentioned already).
- Trend24 shows the latest Twitter trending topics (hashtags) through out the day locally and globally.
- Hashtagify is advanced Twitter Hashtags search engine. It recommends you related hashtags to your keyword, shows several influencers for this keyword and relevant tweets. Very useful free tool for choosing hashtags for your tweets!
- Statusbrew allows you to manage your followers (Audience Feature) and scheduled tweets. Statusbrew finds inactive, spammy or not following back accounts. The tool has very good free version.
- Followerwonk Analyze gives a huge database about any Twitter user's network. This free tool shows you info on user followers and people, whom this user follows. So you can find the best time to engage, popular users, location info, etc.
- Twitonomy provides you detailed info about your Twitter account (or any other). Twitonomy UI is terrible. But it can show analytics of your hashtags usage, daily activity (time & days), followers, retweets statistics. All these insights are available in the free version. Also, this tool is useful for Influencer Marketing research.
- Dlvr.it and Hootsuite for grabbing website RSS feeds and auto-sharing the content. Free accounts permit several RSS feeds.
- Twitter Follower,free extension for multi-follow (or unfollow) users on Twitter.
- If you want to spend less time reading tweets, you can automatically unfollow people. This script from Felix Krause unfollows everybody and puts those followers into a list called "Old Follow".
- Scoutzen allows you to download Twitter followers from your public or private lists. Pretty useful!
- I mentioned tools, that I personally use. However, there are plenty of other great tools to try: The Big List of Twitter Tools: 93 Free Twitter Tools and Apps to Fit Any Need by Kevan Lee from Buffer team.
Facebook has many marketing options that could fit your company focus, budget, and your current knowledge. To target your users there you can work with Personal Profiles, Pages, Groups, and Ads.
🐣 Facebook Pages & Groups:
- Many interesting thoughts on content, post types and other beginners questions: The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Engagement in 2017 by Susan Moeller.
- How to Start Your Facebook Business Page by Alex York.
- How to Write Facebook Status Updates That Will Leave Your Audience Coming Back for More by Neil Patel. It's a useful read, but be aware of many promotional ads with Neil face.
- How to Stand Out with a Brilliant Facebook Cover Photo by Adrienne Branson.
- Facebook page promotion tips by SocialSpacers.
- Facebook Group can help you gather your fans in one place and encourage them to interact with one another. Groups are useful for building an active community of people talking about your product, giving feedback or ideas. It's the good place to have the discussion on betas, coming feature questions, and bugs.
🐤 The Beginner’s Guides to Facebook Advertising. Here you will find step-by-step tutorials for setting up your first ad campaign. I also included articles about ads design, copywriting and typical mistakes. If you have skipped previous content, it will be useful to check posts on the viral headlines in the Personal Blog section and posts in the Social Media Marketing section.
- The Complete, Always-Updated Guide to Facebook Advertising by Kevan Lee, Buffer Marketing Director. Buffer has put together a comprehensive guide on learning Facebook advertising, from the ad setup to analysis.
- Good advice on Ad Copywriting: The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Facebook Ads by Joanna Wiebe.
- 11 Storytelling Formulas to Supercharge Your Social Media Marketing will help you with copywriting as well.
- Practical post on creating emotional Facebook ads by Karola Karlson from Kissmetrics.
- 16 Secrets the Pros Use to Create Great Facebook Ad Designs by Massimo Chieruzzi from AdEspresso team.
- The Primary Reasons Your Ads Don’t work and Keys to Facebook Advertising Success by Jon Loomer.
- After 1.6 Billion Ad Impressions and 408 Facebook Ads, Here’s What I’d Do Differently by Karola Karlson.
- What I learned spending $2 Million on Facebook Ads by Noah Kagan.
🐔 Advanced reading on Facebook Advertising. May the Force be with you!
- The Complete Guide to Facebook Ads Manager: How to Create, Manage, Analyze Facebook Ads from Buffer team.
- The Facebook Pixel: What It Is and How to Use It from Hootsuite team. Facebook pixel is code that you place on your site to track conversions from Facebook ads, optimize ads based on collected data, build targeted audiences for future ads and remarket to qualified leads. We started using Facebook Pixel after 6 months of actively working on Flawless App. This was a mistake. If we used it earlier, we would collect data from all this time for paid marketing on Facebook.
- 6 Ways to Add the Facebook Pixel to Your Website by Jon Loomer.
- 101-Point Guide To Master: Facebook Custom Audiences by Karola Karlson.
- The Big Damn Guide To Facebook Ad Targeting by Kane Jamison.
- Messenger As a Destination for Facebook Ads (podcast) and an illustrated guide to this tool (post) by @Mssg.
- How to Use Facebook Insights & Analytics to Boost Social Media Marketing Strategy by Alfred Lua from Buffer.
- Good video on using remarketing and targeted content creation to get more conversions out of your Facebook ad. Ryan Stewart talks about marketing funnel framework and touchpoints that you have to build for your campaign.
- Facebook Website Custom Audiences: A Definitive Guide for Remarketing by Jon Loomer.
- A/B Testing Facebook Ads: 121 Tips & Ideas for Extraordinary Discoveries by KlientBoost.
- Facebook Ads Bidding 101: Everything You Need to Know by Massimo Chieruzzi from AdEspresso team.
- 29 Facebook Ad Mistakes That Are Budget Drainers by Johnathan Dane from KlientBoost.
- Facebook Ad Conversion Attribution: What You Need to Know by Jon Loomer.
- Facebook Ads Review 101: Rules to follow to get your ads approved quickly! by Massimo Chieruzzi.
- The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Video Ads by Digital Marketer. High five if you have read until this point ✋.
Some more cool hacks:
- How to retarget on Facebook Ads every people who clicked on your link. And even more advanced Facebook retargeting for your Medium Readers by PixelMe team.
- How to Create Facebook Custom Audiences from Facebook Group Members by Grouply team.
- How to export your complete Facebook friends list to Excel
Reddit is one of the most active internet community with its own unique culture. You can get tons of cool information there, great product feedback and first users.

However, it's better to learn Reddit rules and basics before you get banned:
- How to Use Reddit: Beginners Guide by Braveen Kumar.
- Reddiquette. Pay extra attention to the "please don't" section.
- Self-promotion on Reddit.
- A complete glossary of Reddit terms.
Guides on promoting and advertising on Reddit:
- How to Promote on Reddit without Getting (Shadow) Banned or Deleted by Vyper.io team.
- My Experience & 9 Ideas for Advertising on Reddit by Nate Shivar.
- How To Make Your First $1,000 with Reddit Ads by Ryan Luedecke. It's an old, but super informative tutorial.
- The Reddit Ads Experiment: What We Learned for $250 by Alex Berman. Spoiler: "we got a clear confirmation that the Reddit community is still Ad-proof and smells/ignores promoted posts".
- How to Build a Passionate Fanbase with Reddit by Ana Gotter.
- Another interesting case: How To Use Reddit For SEO & Content Marketing Research by Nate Shivar.
📌 Useful tools:
- Later helps to schedule your posts to Reddit and cross-post your link to other subreddits. The tool has a free option.
- Subreddit Analysis Tool from Later. It's a free tool to get insights about subreddits.
- Reddit Insight is an analytics tool for real-time post tracking, single user tracking, and other data analysis.
- SnoopSnoo provides Reddit user and subreddits analytics.
- RedditList is useful for digging up worthwhile subreddits.
- Reddit converter converts your text (blog post) to Reddit markdown.
I want to tell you a secret: HR is not the only people who use LinkedIn. With this platform you can build business partnerships, network online, make direct sales and search for investors. LinkedIn is a perfect place for B2B companies and 👔 business professionals. It's also useful for the self-branding. For the promotional purpose, LinkedIn has Personal Pages, Company Pages, Groups, and Ads.
Your LinkedIn profile can be a complete sales and marketing tool. It should communicate the value of your product and your expertise to potential partners. These guides and tips will help you out:
- Want to Effectively Raise Your Linkedin Profile? Follow These Tips by Larry Kim.
- 5 Templates That'll Make Writing the Perfect LinkedIn Summary a Breeze by Aja Frost.
- 7 LinkedIn Summary Examples That Make You Look Good by Melissa Williams.
- How I Got 425% More Page Views on LinkedIn — and You Can, Too by Aja Frost.
- Using LinkedIn: 7 of my favorite tips by Susan Hallam from Hallam.
- 11 Quick Questions to Ask Yourself Before Accepting a Stranger's LinkedIn Request by Inc.com
LinkedIn can help you get more eyes on your content, and receive a feedback from other folks. Contributing to a discussion will make both your profile and your Company Page more visible. If you listen to Rand Fishkin video on Comment Marketing you know how to establish yourself & your company as thought leaders:
- 255,262 Views on LinkedIn in 30 Days: Here’s Everything I’ve Learned by Gregory Ciott.
- We Analyzed the 3,000 Most Successful LinkedIn Publishing Posts by Paul Shapiro.
- The Most Successful LinkedIn Headlines and Topics of 2016 by Steve Rayson from BuzzSumo.
- How to Publish on LinkedIn Pulse: A Beginner's Guide by Carly Stec. When you have published your post, tweet it with “tip @LinkedInEditors” message. It will maximize your chances to be featured on LinkedIn Pulse Channels.
🕴️Use LinkedIn for direct sales and getting partners. You can write people via invitation note, direct message, InMail or Group message. You should have clear objectives and know exactly who you want to connect with. Business outreach is common and popular among LinkedIn members, but it should be done in a structural way:
- 11 Signs That You've Mastered LinkedIn. Tony Messer gives a general overview of using LinkedIn with a sales purpose.
- The Anatomy of Great LinkedIn Sales Message by Emma Brudner. The example is kind of formal, but it worth to try out.
- How to Write Reply-Worthy LinkedIn InMail by Melissa Williams from Yesware team.
- The ingredients of a Great LinkedIn Sales Message by Mark Williams.
- Please, check also Cold Email Marketing section below. Articles there have awesome templates & advice for cold outreach.
📢 LinkedIn Company Pages & Advertising options:
- LinkedIn Company / Business Page Best Practices with Examples from ShivarWeb staff.
- Company Page Best Practices with Page Examples via LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn Analytics for Company Page by Hootsuite team.
- LinkedIn Ads: Step-by-Step Tutorial by AdEspresso team.
- How to Advertise On LinkedIn Effectively by Nate Shivar.
- The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Conversion Tracking by Tom Whiley.
- 5 tactics which can help reach your ideal audience and increase conversion rates. Written by Michael McEuen.
I heavily use LinkedIn. As you remember, we run Flawless App — a tool for iOS & macOS engineers. A lot of our users spend time on LinkedIn, participate in iOS groups or post articles there. I often post cool stuff in those groups, engage with people via direct messages or share my writings. Unfortunately, I do get spam or some random requests from job seekers\recruiters. But in general, LinkedIn works for me.
📌 Useful tools:
- If you need to grow your LinkedIn connection base, use this script. It will automatically add targeted people from the "People You May Know" section. You only need to choose the keywords.
- Dux-Soup is another good tool to automatically add LinkedIn connections + send invitations. Free account is not really useful. Paid version really worth 15$ a month. It has auto-inviting with personalised messages, auto-messages to 1st degree connections, downloading your tag-lists with links to profiles.
- LinkedIn X-Ray Search tool using Google. With a free account, you only get 100 search results. To get around this limitation you can use X-Ray Searching.
❔Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer site, where you can get traffic by helping the community:
- Growth Hacking 1,500+ Visits From Quora by Ryan Stewart.
- How to Get Thousands of Leads from Quora in Five Months by Josh Fechter, the "Top Quora Writer of 2017."
- How To Use Quora For SEO & Content Marketing by Nate Shivar.