This resource was originally created to accompany a workshop presented by Jack Aponte and Alice Aguilar of the Progressive Technology Project at the 2010 NYC Strategic Communications Conference, organized by a group of NYC-based foundations. Jack continutes to update this from time to time, most recently in advance of a Social Media 201 training for the Manhattan Neighborhood Network on July 26, 2012.
General Information on Social Media
- The New York Times' David Pogue provides a handy introduction to the most popular social networking services – a great introduction for folks completely new to the world of social media.
- REVERB Crib Notes is a collection of blog posts from the Progressive Technology Project that "tracks emerging communications tools and strategies useful to community organizers."
- The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) frequently provides webinars (recordings are free for NTEN members), information, and blog posts about social media for nonprofits.
- The Social Source Commons Blog provides information about "interesting tools, toolboxes, and people related to nonprofit tech and social media."
- Walking Through Organizing Your Online Channels is a great introduction to using Aspiration Tech's Publishing Matrix tool, which can help you keep your social media and other communications tools organized and integrated.
- Mashable is a blog dedicated to providing social media news and web tips; check them out for a constant stream of news about developments in social media as well as general information, guides, and tips.
- Who Owns Your Meme? User-Generated Content Ownership on Social Networks provides a great breakdown of the Terms of Service for many social networking sites and what they mean for user-generated content.
- Jack wrote on her blog about concerns over trapping content in Facebook, Twitter, and other services that retain rights to your content and make it difficult to get your content back out.
- Mashable's Facebook Guide Book is a large and comprehensive collection of resources that can help you master Facebook.
- Non-profits on Facebook is "a resource for non-profits and other organizations for social good" that was built "to help you harness the power of Facebook and bring positive change to the world." In addition to ongoing updates, it provides some great resources including a very handy Facebook Pages manual.
- Facebook Tips: What’s the Difference between a Facebook Page and Group? and Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide break down the differences between Pages and Groups.
- This post on Econsultancy.com explains how Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm works to determine what appears in users' news feeds and provides tips on how to improve your content's ranking.
- For more on EdgeRank, check out this post from Antony at web2change, a site with an explicit social change emphasis. Antony highlights how to monitor your page's EdgeRank standings using Facebook Insights.
- The Facebook Purity browser plug-in for Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera lets you customize and clean up what you see on Facebook. (You can even hide ads!)
- Twitter 101, direct from Twitter itself.
- Mashable's Twitter Guide Book, like the Facebook guide above, is a great collection of Twitter resources. It includes a great guide to hashtags and a collection of Twitter video tutorials.
- The Twitter Glossary includes definitions of commonly used lingo and vocabulary.
- What the Trend explains what hashtags mean, shows what hashtags are trending, and shows stats on their usage, e.g. http://whatthetrend.com/trend/%23p2
- Using URL shorteners are key when you're limited to 140 characters. Popular shorteners include http://tinyurl.com and http://is.gd. http://ow.ly and http://bit.ly offer the added perk of tracking and stats for shortened URLs. Most of these tools offer web browser plug-ins that make using them easier; they're also built into many Twitter applications.
- HootSuite and CoTweet are two paid services that let you share access to one Twitter account with multiple individuals, among other features.