Social Media Guides and Resources!

It’s no secret that the social media scene is mainstream more than ever in 2010. Social media can be powerful networking tools both for business and personal computer users alike. Even though controversy has raised big concerns on privacy and other problems time and time again they continue to thrive and are not going anywhere soon. Marketing, branding and advertising are huge factors for businesses trying to sell products and services to the consumers on a mass level. If you are a small business getting started it can be crucial to advertise using many of the social networking sites available to market your brand and sell your products or services while at the same time, driving major traffic to your website increasing sales and page rank taking advantage of the giant internet market share.

Many corporate and small business’s spend thousands even millions of dollars yearly on advertising, graphic design, niche keywords, seo, creating sitemaps, adding meta-tags, studying analytics and statistics to try to stay on top of their competition. While getting listed on the top of search engines is always first important. Social media has become mandatory for the corporate world. So I decided to write this post to help guide newbies and veterans alike to get the most out of  social networking for personal or business.

20 Most Popular Social Networking Websites February 2010:

Here are the 20 Most Popular Social Networking Websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.

• Ebizmba

Facebook Guides and helpful resources:

Facebook offers many ways to promote your business to its online community. From creating a Facebook Page for your business, to starting a topical Group, to launching a targeted ad campaign, Facebook is becoming an increasingly important component of a company’s online marketing mix.

• Mashable Guide – An excellent guide on Facebook from the mashable website primarily concentrating on social web media.
• Fan Page optimization tips – Great tips on fan pages.
• Facebook profile .psd template – A great free facebook profile template in a photoshop .psd layers file you can customize any way you want.
• Facebook Page Template Psd – A free psd template.
• Stayin Alive Howtos – A great resource for coding everything social media.
• HyperArts – A short tutorial on customizing Facebook pages with the static FBML application.
• Inside Facebook – A blog all about Facebook News.
• All Facebook – The unofficial facebook resource site.
• Facebook reviews - Social News Reviews and Trends.
• Facebook Devlopment resources – Updated links to lots of Facebook development tools and resources.
• Facebook Ascii – Tutorial site for Facebook.
• Youtube Tutorials – The best way to learn facebook fast. More Youtube tuts.
• Facebook Privacy Settings Guide – Great mashable post on privacy settings on facebook.
• 10E20 – Facebook wallpost and info privacy and other great articles.

Twitter Guides and Resources:

Twitter is a micro-blogging service for messages of up to 140 characters that can be updated via SMS, Email, Web, Browsers, Desktop clients and whatever else. It can be used for telling the world what you’re doing, sharing insight, communicating with friends and associates and getting answers to your questions.

• Free Twitter Psd template – Customize your own twitter background with this template in any resolution with photoshop.
• Creative twitter backgrounds – Learn to create your own twitter background in simple to follow steps anyone can follow.
• Web Designer Depot – Very Informative twitter guide.
• Twitter Background Gallery - Ideas and resources for designing your own twitter background.
• Submitted Twitter Backgrounds – In the UK a rating system for twitter backgrounds. Nice site layout!

YouTube Guides and Resources:

Branded and partner channels on YouTube differentiate themselves by having more design options. Although you are pretty limited with design options for a user channel, you can make some adjustments. Even companies like Philips use YouTube’s built-in limitations to maximum leverage.

If your eager to start, but don’t have any fancy image editing programs like Photoshop, then try Gimp. Gimp is a free alternative to Photoshop and works very well. If you’re not to keen on downloading and installing a full blown image editing program then do a Google search for “Online image editors” or check this post. There are many very impressive tools that mimic the features of Gimp and Photoshop.

In conclusion, It’s necessary to personalize yourself and your brand, not only to send the right message but to stand out! A YouTube background template will greatly speed up the time spent on creating your YouTube background but the end result will be worth the effort.

• Youtube video tutorials – Excellent youtube tutorial videos for anyone to easily do there own custom youtube backgrounds with little effort. PSD Template Download.
• Branded Channels – Branding on youtube channels and why it is important to every business.
• Deviant Art Youtube psd Template – This is the 2.0 beta version template available on Deviant Art. Deviant art has some of the very best resources for Art on Graphic Design.
• Background Tube – Free youtube channel background templates and good examples.
• Google Branding specs – Layout specs and other important information.
• Google help forum - Googles own youtube help forum.

Social Networking information and resources:

• Online social Networking – Great informative site on the world of social networking.
• Mashable - One of the very best resources for social networking on the web today.
• DeviantArt – One of the best sites around for designers and art enthusiast. Join the community and experience a wealth of artistic excellence. Some of the best graphic designers on the net contribute to this network.

I covered in this post resources for the Big-3 social networking sites that are the most popular in my opinion, and drive the most traffic. Some more 2010 social networking sites are listed here on Technobite. I hope you enjoyed this post and if you can contribute more information by all means comment on them below.