
Social Media
From growing your audience to advanced content promotion to building your brand, the importance of social media to digital marketing can't be overstated. Whether you've been in the game from the very beginning or are just starting to wonder how social media tools can apply to your own professional life, the resources on this page can help you reach the next level.
We've hand-picked some of our favorite pieces of content to get you started with learning about social media marketing. Once you’ve studied those, check out the most recent Moz Blog posts about social media below.
Social Media Competitor Analysis: The Complete Guide : A detailed breakdown of how to analyze your social media competitors for a better understanding of your consumers, and to help grow your brand.
How to Turn One Piece of Content into Multiple for SEO : A simple guide to scaling your content publishing output and providing value to your audience.
How Social Media Trends Can Influence Your SEO : Actionable steps for taking advantage of social media trends and building it into your brand’s digital marketing strategy.
Social Media, Influencer Marketing, and SEO : In our free SEO Learning Center, we'll show you how social media, influencer marketing, and PR play a role in search engine optimization.
Creating a Social Media Strategy : The key to success is to have a plan. In this video, you’ll learn how to lay the foundation of all your future social media work.


How To Make Your Offline Presence Work For You Online
I was recently working on a social media strategy for a popular city newspaper and it got me thinking about the benefits a business can get from a well-thought out crossover between its offline and online presence. I've tried to write this post so that it's useful for any sized business that has some kind of offline presence, from a shop, through a publication to any kind of offline advertising or PR. If you're spending money offline, you should consider how that investment can be taken advantage of online.
Die Digg-Bar Die, Die! (or Should You Kill the Digg Bar on Your Website)
You'll have noticed that Digg has recently added the Digg-bar as a central feature, if not the main feature of their social media website. TechCrunch's discussion has a good range of comments from all sides. Having read a few such discussions, used Digg and developed a frames jail-break plugin to release my pages from Digg's grip, I thought my first YOUmoz post was due with my reflections on the use and abuse, hits and misses of the Digg-bar.
Social Media and Ethics for Small Businesses
I would like to see some more discussion about Social Media Rules and Ethics. I work for a small company which is open to social media, but we don't entirely get it. We attempted a social media campaign last year, but after a few months of work it slowly fizzled into just me posting a few pictures on Flickr every week. One of the major problems has been knowing when and where we could actually promote our products. We thought we were playing by the rules, but a few sites/people called us out as marketers.
Social Media Marketing: What is Your Goal?
Tonight, I'm wondering why you engage in social media marketing - is it personal, on behalf of your company (or clients), or some combination of the two? Why do you have social media accounts? What do you use them for? Note that you can choose multiple answers:
Twitter is Email Marketing 2.0
There still seems to be hesitation by some industry professionals to jump on the Twitter bandwagon because they don’t yet understand its value. They don’t see a bottom-line altering reason to devote manpower and resources into building up Twitter followers and starting to tweet. While the uses of Twitter are as varied as the number of members, to those professionals, I would like to present the case that Twitter can be considered and used as Email Marketing 2.0.
Viral Marketing Tips and Examples
Viral marketing. We've seen it, enjoyed it, passed it on, and thought, “I could do something like this for my clients.” Most of us, however, do not pass the “I could” stage while others experiment with varying degrees of success. One thing is for sure, a well-executed viral marketing campaign can have a profound effect on traffic and branding. This post will reflect on main characteristics of successful campaigns and cover observations with two successful viral content experiments.
Facebook Advertising - An Opportunity for Deep Targeting at Very Low Cost
The following post is a collaborative effort by myself and David Klein (DK), who does far more Facebook advertising consulting than SEOmoz :-) He recently visited with the Facebook crew and has been helping more online marketers get comfortable and invested in the space.
Social Networking - The Other Side
I am so sick of hearing about using social networking sites to boost SERPs. Every time someone suggests this, I feel like banging my head against a wall. Not only does it go completely against the spirit of these sites, it is probably one of the hardest things to do successfully, and without alienating an entire community in the process.
Yes, Social Media is Powerful. No, It's Not as Powerful as Search.
It's late. I'm just back from a week of travel and crazy amounts of email (note to other CEOs, when emailing 120K people with a special offer, be wary of putting your email address as the reply-to). I had a terrific time at the Online Marketing Summit - great people, many of whom I'd never met before, an impressive turnout of more than 500 (even in a down economy; wow!) and some terrific networking parties (the conference even featured catered dinner for the attendees, which was really nice). One of the subjects that arose, as usual, was the emergence and power of social media, and I had some quick thoughts to share.
Social Media: The People's Choice Awards of the Internet
I've been hearing a lot of grumbling lately about the steady degradation of the quality of content online, especially as it relates to social media and social news sites. I don't necessarily agree with the gripes--was content that magical in 1999? As far as I can recall, there were hamster dances, dancing babies and Geocities pages long before LOLcats, Rickrolls and MySpace. Sure, there are millions and millions more people online now than there were 10 years ago and there are buttloads more pages of content, but to me, the type and quality of content hasn't changed all that much. You still have news articles and research papers and useful information in one corner, and porn, memes, photoshopped images, and general nonsense in another corner.