The team at VA Partners is continually striving to become a great resource for our clients, startups and other growing organizations. As we develop and learn about new best practices, trends and tools in the sales and marketing world, we’ve accumulated some valuable knowledge. We are happy to share our experiences in our blog posts.

Here’s a round-up of the 10 most popular social media blogs of 2015:

1. 12 Ways to Use IFTTT to Improve Your Social Media and Productivity
   While social media management tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to schedule updates and monitor your social media engagement, automation tools such as IFTTT take it up a notch by allowing you to create specific actions based on triggers. Here’s how IFTTT works, and examples of how to use it to streamline your social media as well as other productivity tasks.




2. How to Get Started with LinkedIn Publishing in 10 Minutes
   Last year, LinkedIn opened up it’s publishing platform to all their users, giving professionals an opportunity to get more exposure and visibility across both their current network and beyond. In addition to publishing content on your own company blog, publishing on LinkedIn’s platform can help you get even more reach, especially if you’re already using LinkedIn.




3. The Top 5 Free Stock Photo Sites
   Images are an essential part of effective website designs, blog posts and social media activity. Not only does content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without, images also increase engagement on social media. We came across a number of free stock photo sites with images that are modern, beautiful, and that you’d be proud to use on your blog posts or website pages.




4. 5 Ways to Use Twitter Lists for B2B Businesses
   The amount of information that is pumped out on Twitter can be overwhelming. Twitter lists are a collelction of Twitter users that are placed in a specific category based on one common idea. When you click into a specific list, you only see tweets from those who have been added to that list. Twitter lists can then help you organize your feed to make the most out of your Twitter experience.




5. How to Create a Great Social Media Plan [Infographic]
   New to social media or want to improve your online presence through social media? Contrary to what you may believe, there is a science behind successful social media management. Follow these 5 steps to learn how to create a great social media plan in no time.




6. Using Twitter for B2B Sales
   Twitter is an excellent tool to stay on top on industry news and events. It is also a great tool for sales people. I have been able to nurture target clients, get speaking opportunities, and even book meetings with prospects through Twitter.




7. Why Your Business Should be Embracing Social & Digital Marketing
   B2B and B2C selling in today’s market requires more than just traditional sales and marketing methods to be truly successful. It’s important to invest in areas like social media, content marketing, SEO, digital marketing and are doing fine.




8. 14 Essential Social Networks to Register Your Brand On
   A social media plan is essential for any modern business. Not only can social media bring new leads, businesses can use social media to stay in touch with leads during the sales process. Not all social networks may be relevant to all companies and businesses ; however, it’s still a good idea to create accounts as placeholders to prevent someone else from taking the username.




9. How to Find and Share Great Third Party Content
   When leveraging social media to improve your online presence, it’s important to share your own content to promote your business skills, but also share great third party content. There are many reasons why sharing third party content can help benefit your business, including: help improve your following, engage your audience and meet potential clients.




10. How to Create Twitter Lists
    Here at VA Partners, we find Twitter lists to be very valuable for managing our social media efforts. We use Twitter lists to help us monitor content, industry news, and events. Twitter lists have a lot of potentials, and there are number of great ways to use Twitter lists since they are easily customized.

If you’re looking for more helpful reads this holiday season, be sure to check out some of our free downloadable white papers!