Social media can be confusing. There are so many different networks and tools your business can use that you have to carefully choose which ones are best for your business.

Snapchat reaches young people- this guide is written by a 22 year old. CNN, People, ESPN, Mashable, Vice and other major media outlets have snap stories available, some very highly produced compared to the snapstories of a teen.

But, right out of the box- figuring out snapchat (and the other similar apps- Fleek and Yeti) isn’t exactly intuitive- that’s why we like this simple guide.

Here are all the basics, as well as everything you never knew you could do on Snapchat. It’s easier than it seems.

Source: A 22-year-old made the ultimate guide on how to use Snapchat

If you are near a college campus and market to students- these apps, plus Yik Yak are where you want to be.

It’s hard enough to secure a url for many companies now- but what about the array of social media sites?

Meet KnowEm– which checks all the social media sites for your user name:

KnowEm was developed to assist everyone – from individuals to Fortune 500 companies – in discovering where their names, brands, or trademarked terms are available (or stolen) on Social Media networks. KnowEm will not only help you secure your name across the vast social media landscape but we can also show you how to contact each site in order to have the name released and returned to you.

via About Knowem, LLC.

A handy dandy tool for finding out who has your user name- and what Social Media sites you could be on.

We think the most important are YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn- and possibly FourSquare. But, you can decide after a visit here.

Going to almost any conference today you’ll see a sea of netbooks, iPads, smart phones, and laptops- all furiously being typed on. Some are answering e-mails, some are taking private notes- but, there is a whole “back channel” going on- a conversation/archive of the conference in 140 characters or less. You can contribute, follow along, or put down your pencil or digital device- and just relax and take it in- counting on the smart people in the room to write it all down for you- so you can go harvest the fruits of their labors in the evening.

Typically, all the tweets are using a #hashtag to mark their tweets as belonging to your conference. Use one of the tips from the following link- I’ll include my two favorites at the end, and you can be a hero. Just remember- do it nightly- because twitter is shortening the life of tweet archives as the service becomes more popular:

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this “date limit” has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter’s search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is “around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow.”What that means is something tweeted prior to a week and a half ago can never be retrieved via search.twitter.com. That’s bad for users and it’s definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

via 10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets.

The first two services from the above post are my preferred choices from his options, the third seems to do a really nice job too:

• The archivist – looks slick, and comes in a desktop (windows only ;( version) or web based. It doesn’t have the ability to go back more than 500 tweets- so, if it’s a big conference- you might want to start it at lunch or sooner. It continues to update as time goes on.
• Twapper Keeper– which isn’t as pretty a site- but gives a lot more control in what you archive.
• What the Hashtag– it’s descriptive tags are sometimes out of date- but it does a nice job.

What do you do with your archive? You can edit out the duplicitous retweets- and the invariable stupidity “I love the presenters boots” that some people insist on spewing- and then turn it into your boss- or, you could brand a PDF and send it out with your analysis and thought leading positions as an extra bonus – networking tool. What could be more useful after a conference than a great piece of documentation? Throw in links to all the slidedecks, links to speakers- and you are a superhero.

Unfortunately, I tried to use Twitter search last night- and save the HTML pages- a deadly slow and painful process for www.summitup.org – where I spoke yesterday. I have all the tweets- in a pretty sloppy format- had I searched for “Archive tweets” instead of “Save Tweets” or “Search tweets” – I’d be looking like a superhero myself. I hope this helps you- at your next conference. It certainly will be a part of any conference I plan or speak at from here on out.

And if you need a speaker about “How to moderate comments like a ninja” or how to build a website that works for you- easily- feel free to contact me.