Social Media Quick Start Kit

If you are reading this, you have been thinking about how to incorporate social media as part of your content marketing strategy. You may even have experience with at least one platform. But if you struggle to understand not only which one works best, but even how each platform is used in the most basic sense, you are not alone.You may feel like you don’t want to miss the boat, but you don’t want to spend a lot of effort and not have any ROI to show for it. Those are valid concerns. It would be easy to head down the path to try some social media and then find out you aren’t getting the results you want.If you want to understand the basics and start getting some ideas of the possibilities, I’ve compiled a Social Media Quick Start Kit.These books make understanding social media easyYou don't need to meet an expert to teach you the basics of social media tools for marketing. Someone already wrote a book about it. The books I've chosen are easy to read, full of valuable information and excellent reference texts.These three books cover the platforms I believe present the biggest mysteries to life science marketers. Notably absent are guides for Facebook and LinkedIn. For now, I'll assume most people understand how Facebook works and leave that discussion for a later post.There are also many helpful books on LinkedIn, but I can’t say I have found the definitive B2B guide yet. LinkedIn has great potential for B2B marketers on both company and individual pages. I’ll cover that in a detailed blog post soon.The links below go to Amazon. I am not an affiliate, so I doesn’t matter to me whether you buy through here or not. But maybe you’ll find the reviews helpful.The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time by Mark SchaeferWhat the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us by Guy KawasakiThe Marketer's Guide to SlideShare: How to Build Your Brand, Generate Leads & Create Opportunities by Todd WheatlandP.S. I occasionally post curated articles on content marketing to my own social networks. If you want to follow me on Google+, Twitter or LinkedIn, click the social media icons at the top of this post.Topics: Content Marketing, Social Media