The following article delves into the three main reasons most companies struggle to gain Facebook “fans” and offers tips and tricks to get your brand not just “liked” but loved.

Read this article…

At home we have a problem with our neighbor’s yard, Grove Park Inn’s golf course, causing major runoff problems almost every time there is a burst of rain. This particular time I decided to step outside and make a little video with my cheap Flip video camera. It ended up being the lead story on the 6 o’clock news that week. This is how that happened, and how you can use video and social media to get some attention:

1. Capture simple video of something “remarkable”
2. Upload video to a sharing site like Youtube, etc.
3. Write a short blog post about and embed the video on the page
4. Mention it on Twitter, Facebook etc. (There are tools that can tie all these accounts together and make sharing easier.)
5. Get other people to mention it on Twitter, or “retweet” it
6. Get noticed by people with popular blogs (In this case it was Ashvegas)
7. Get noticed by local mainstream media such as the newspaper or TV stations
8. Agree to do the interview when they call, even if it’s inconvenient

I’ll admit that it may be a little harder to promote your business the same way, but not impossible. Surely you have something, at least occasionally, that will be interesting to a lot of people. But you have to put it out there, and give it a promotional nudge if you want people to see it.

If you don’t have a blog for your business, get one now. There are numerous free options and you don’t need technical skills. So there are no excuses. Then get a cheap video camera. We like the Flip product line, but the are other good brands and cameras out there for less than $200. Now, what are you going to video and blog about? We have a mind map about content creation that may help.

Video of newscast at WLOS.com

Post at Ashvegas blog

The backyard Flip video that got the social media ball rolling:

AVL Marketing is an Asheville marketing agency. We can help you tell your story.

Here’s a short video I made for my friend Dan. It’s really easy to add a WordPress blog your LinkedIn profile. As you can see from the video it took me less two minutes to do it, and that’s while I was blabbing about it. If you have a business-to-business enterprise, or if you’re a professional or consultant, a blog is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and experience while providing information of real value to your target market. But wait there’s more! Continually producing high quality content also has a massive SEO (search engine optimization) benefit. Your site will show up higher in search rankings if you’re using keywords related to your business. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.

If you’re going to do the work of creating great content you should get as much leverage from it as possible by incorporating it into your social media marketing efforts and social networking sites. So take two minutes to integrate your blog with your LinkedIn. Once it’s done, new blog posts will be automatically be added. Now that’s modern marketing. You might be surprised how many people will find your content through your LinkedIn profile.

Let us know if you have any questions.

DandyID is an interesting service. I haven’t used to it load my standard account info into a new social media account, yet, but it seems like it will be a major time saver. Moreover, if you ever move and need to change an address or phone number you can change the info in one place instead of several social media-type accounts. I definitely love the WordPress plugin and the other widgets they offer that make it easy to display icons and links to all you social stuff.

Certainly the best features are saved for the “Pro” level. The best of those are (from the site):

SEO Enhanced Links:
Increase your visibility in top search engines, by passing the “link juice” through to your individual profiles (I assume this is because they don’t apply “nofollow” tags to the premium accounts.)

Personal Stats:
Track how people are connecting with your complete identity across the web

Social Analytics:
Learn where your contacts exist online and which social networks are most important to them

Here’s my widget with the accounts I’ve added so far. Friend me up!

More about DandyID in their own words:

DandyID lets you easily collect all of your online profiles in one convenient place and allows people to discover the real verified you across the web. Powerful social analytics let you track how people are engaging you online.

Check out DandyID.org to try it for yourself.

Here’s a quick lesson in using social media to market your business from my 12 year old (almost 13!) son Mars. He likes fingerboards, tiny skateboards you can ride using your fingers. Turns out millions of kids like them. And apparently a lot of those kids have Flips or other affordable ways of making videos to show off their skills and creative ideas for “skate parks.”

Just Google “fingerboarding” to see how popular it is. Most of the search results will be for Youtube videos. Many of these fingerboarders now have very popular channels on Youtube. These kids don’t know a world without the web and social media. Sharing and interacting online is completely natural to them.

Fingerboarding as a hobby has now branched into kids making their own boards, from scratch. There are even videos about how to do this. So serial entrepreneur Mars, who is always making something, decides he is now in the manufacturing game, albeit at the hand made level. He has some friends on Youtube who have become fingerboarding new media celebrities. This is how Mars plans to pull it all together to sell his product:

1. “Sponsor” some “celebrities” by giving them his products to use
2. Ask the celebs to “endorse” his fingerboards by using them in their next video, get a mention
3. Funnel that traffic to his own Youtube channel or Etsy store

Some high level steps to using social media for business, that every 12 year old already knows:

1. Interact, engage, comment, compliment, make friends in the networks that make sense for you
2. Create your own related media (tweets, videos, blog posts, etc.) to show you’re legit
3. Partner, sponsor, joint venture, with players bigger than you to tap into their audience

That is all for now. Tell me in the comments if there is something you want me to talk about.