As we all continue to barrel down the social media discovery path, more and more case studies and best practices are surfacing to help guide our learning curve. Over the past few months, some excellent comprehensive guides have been created to help us all  along. These guides are emerging at a crucial time especially as platforms such as Twitter struggle to retain new users due to a lack of upfront user guidance.

Here are a few resource guides that I would highly recommend checking out:

I realize I’ve already mentioned both these guides, but it’s worth another mention. Key for any marketers looking to figure out the baseline purpose and intent of utilizing Facebook as an effective marketing tool.

About Face – A free white paper on Facebook pages (By Advance Guard)

Free ebook – How to Use Facebook for Business (By HubSpot)

The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook (On Mashable) – good idea for PR folks to check out what’s being presented to the the journalist side.

Very timely move by Twitter to launch their own guide and the Mashable guide is equally as stellar, linking to past posts on the site with plenty of great graphics – love you for this Mashable!

Twitter 101 for Business (By Twitter)

The Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions (By Mashable)

YouTube already does a great job of laying out their own internal guide, but here’s a great resource for maximizing the new channel layout.

How To: Customize Your YouTube Channel (On Mashable)

Blogging

This is tough to list resources for because the fact of the matter is that your best solution to learning how to blog is to immediately subscribe to Copyblogger, Remarkablogger and Problogger and read every post each of them have ever written. Time consuming? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.

The Newbie Guide to Blogging

SEO

Yes, a bit older guide (published Nov. 13, 2008) but stands the test of the time and is definitely the most user-friendly SEO guide I’ve come across.

Search Engine Optimization Guide (By Google)

I realize I’m just hitting on the main platforms here so feel free to add your suggestions with links to additional guides below!

-Scott