Social Media Advisors – Page 66 – We are Social Media Advisors, a Social Media Speaker, & Custom WordPress Site design.

How to Create a Custom Facebook Page ~ A Workshop with Mike Mueller

How to Create a Custom Facebook Page -A Workshop with Mike Mueller

Not too long ago Facebook turned 6 years old. During the same week, they announced that they had crossed the 400 million member mark. Facebook has morphed from a college photo sharing to a mega-networking platform with endless capabilities. Basically, it’s THE place to be these days. Many though are not even aware of the fact that Facebook is not just for farmville & friends, but that it can actually be one of the most powerful business tools available for your business. Also, if you are using a profile for business you always run the possibility of getting it suspended by violating Facebook TOS. Section 4.2 states this: “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain” Pretty self explanatory.

But Jeremy, you just said that it can be one of the most powerful business tools available to your business. Yes, I did, and let me explain how. While you cannot use your profile, you can set up a Custom Facebook Page to create business. These pages are designed solely for business and is encouraged to be used that way. The other great thing with a Custom Facebook Page is that they can have unlimited number of fans & can be really customized for your business. They will also offer the ability to be “sell” your business on Facebook.

So, if you aren’t yet sure how to build a custom Facebook Page for business, I might have a nice solution for you next week.

On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th at 2pm Eastern time, 210 Consulting is hosting a workshop with our good friend Mike Mueller on How to build a custom Facebook Page. In this class, Mike will be teaching us how to create a custom Facebook Pages. Mike has created roughly 200 custom Facebook Pages for his clients, and we are honored that he agreed to teach this for us.

Included among the topics next week:

How to build a custom Facebook Page
How to fully customize your Facebook Page once you have it built
Creating and adding custom tabs to your Facebook Page
The differences between the page categories and which information is displayed with each on your custom Facebook Page

The session will last 90 minutes, give or take. We wanted to make this phenomenal instruction affordable for our clients and friends, so we are only charging $49. I promise that you will get more value than you pay for this session.

Seating is limited, so be sure to go ahead and register now if you’re interested. Visit How to Create a Custom Facebook Page to save your spot or simply register below. I’m sincerely not sure when or if this will be offered again online. Mike has taught these techniques in person to individuals around the country, but not online in this way before. He graciously agreed to do this for us since he is our friend. This is (for now at least) an exclusive offer from 210 Consulting only.

If you have any questions at all, let us know in the comments below.

5 Tips For Using Video Effectively

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Video is quickly becoming a more and more popular way of connecting with the public. It is a quick and easy way to get your points across, keeps the audiences attention, and attracts another sphere of consumers. YouTube is now the second most used search engine next to Google due to the rising popularity of video.

So, with more and more people entering into video, the importance of doing it right is so important. Here are a few tips to increase your success with video.

1. Reduce background noise as much as possible. Have you ever seen a video where the main person you cannot understand because of the crowd noise around them? If you are in a noisy area you may not be able to get your points across because your audience will be distracted by other sounds. If consumers get frustrated by not being able to hear you, or the quality of audio is low, they will leave. An easy fix is to either record in areas that are not noisy, or if you have to record there, find a camera that allows you to use an external microphone.

2. Use a tripod! It will help steady your picture so you don’t give your audience motion sickness. Have you ever watched a video like this? No Matter how steady I tried to keep my hands, it looks like there is a constant earthquake happening the entire time I am recording. Setting the camera on a tripod will remove all that. If you don’t have a tripod, try just setting it down on a table, or some other flat steady surface. It will achieve the same effect.

3. Don’t rush! Take your time when panning around a room so that people can soak in all the details of what you are trying to share with them. Plus if you go too quickly it will make the video jerky and possibly give them nausea. Also, unless you have a really high quality camera, it will blur everything together & the details will get lost. While you are there in the room, and your eyes are moving that quickly with no problem, the consumers aren’t there & they have to rely on the speed of a camera which is much slower. Use slow steady fluid movements when panning.

4. Make sure things are lit properly. If your area where you are shooting your video is too dark or too light, it will not give the people the effect you are trying for. The great benefit of video is you can make your audience feel like they are right there in the same room. A poorly lit room will also lose a major amount of video quality. Things will get grainy and not convey exactly what you want. On the other end, don’t go too overboard or you will wash out all of the vibrant colors. You will look pale and as if you have not been out in the sun in 12 years.

5. Use music. Music helps people to relate to things and helps to give them better memory of a certain thing. It can be great for intros & endings for a video. Depending on what you are doing, you may want to use some music for the entire video. If you are going to have music play throughout the entire video, make sure to lower the volume during times that someone is speaking. If not, the music will overpower the speech. Also, pick music that goes along with the topic of the video. Obviously, you wouldn’t use heavy metal with a real estate video, or lullabies with an interview. Whatever you do, make sure you only use music that you have permission to use, we don’t want any lawsuits.

Here are two videos. The first is a video I made in a hurry to show a rental property to my brother who wass moving from Austin, TX back to Myrtle Beach, SC. I made this video in a matter of 5 minutes and spent about 2 minutes editing. You will notice that I did not use any of the five tips listed above. My guess is that anyone who would watch this video would be turned off from watching in no time.

Wasn’t that video rather boring? Now, this second video was produced by someone at my church to share with new visitors about all of the different ministries that are offered. The 5 keys above were used to the fullest extent and the final result was an awesome video that keeps your attention from the beginning to the end. If you watch closely, you will even find me show up a few times throughout the video participating in the many ministries I am involved in. Hope everyone enjoys!

I hope these 5 tips help you to improve your final video products. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

5 Tools to Cash In On Your Social Media Investment

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Whenever I start working with a new client, I always try to ask in the first meeting the same question: “What results would you like to accomplish from being on a social media network?” 9 out of 10 times the response I receive is: To make money of course! But, unfortunately with the ever changing amount of networks and new platforms being birthed almost weekly it seems, many become overwhelmed instantly. You run away never to come back.

Then comes along a request from a good buddy and you figure you might as well at least try it out. So, you join the network and slowly start participating. You realize quickly that you just connected with 20 different friends that you haven’t talked to in the past 20 years. Once this happens, many begin to lose their focus and reason that they originally joined this network and it turns into a cocktail party of fun for you. Now that you have found that comfortable place, you begin socializing with your friends & associates and completely lose site of the purpose you joined was to make money.

A few weeks ago I wrote about The Importance of Listening with Purpose To Your Consumers. This post talks about how listening to what consumers are saying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook can lead to increases in business. I mentioned how each network has certain applications available to assist you in tracking what consumers are saying about their needs for your services or goods. The two that I talked about in that post were TweetGrid and Facebook Search.

I decided that today I would share a few other tools that I have found to be beneficial in Cashing In On Your Social Media Investment. Of course, a solid blog is before any of these items, as that is your foundation to any social media marketing strategy.

1. Google Alerts- I have Google alerts at the top of my list for a reason. In case you aren’t familiar with what it is, let me first explain. Google alerts is a notifying program produced by Google. You can set up an alert to be notified of any keyword/search term you wish. For me, one of the terms I use is my name. Why? I want to know every time Google is picking up my name. It lets me know if someone has either re-blogged a post of mine, mentioned something good or bad about me, and allows me to know what is being said about me. I have this alert set to notify me immediately. The other day when Jason Crouch wrote about our first webinar, How to Chug Google Juice & Get 15 Years of Fame, I received an alert in less than 8 minutes. In fact, it came so quick, that I received that before Jason’s email stating that he had included my name in the post!

Some other ways you could use this is to set up some alerts for the keywords you are trying to dominate in the search engines. That way, you will know when your posts are being indexed for those keywords, and also know what your competition is saying on the same type of terms. Google Alerts are a must have for any business you do.

2. A Solid Twitter Application- There are plenty of different platforms available here. I am not going to say one is better than another, but I will say that you need to be running some sort of program other than just the web version. Applications like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, & Hootsuite are some of the most popular ones and they allow you to filter your lists into different categories. For example, I have an entire column just for closest friends, another for local people, one for specific terms and several others. With one of these applications, you can set up different columns for your target audiences, friends, and for those who can supply you with great valuable content to enhancing your business or to relay onto your clients.

3. A Mobile Photo Blog- Normally when I start talking about this one, I begin to lose people. I actually have two mobile photo blogs. Both bring me a ton of traffic as well as some really great connections & Google juice. One photoblog, currently has 490 email subscribers to it. My other photo blog which is hosted on posterous, is currently averaging around 800-1000 views per photo. This is HUGE! One of the beautiful parts of a photo blog like this is that it takes virtually zero effort to post to. Once you have things set up properly, you simply shoot the picture with your mobile phone and email it to a specific email address with the subject line being your photo title. The rest is automatically handled as your photos will be re-sized & formatted to fit well on your post.

Speaking of mobile phones, that leads me to my next point.

4. A Powerhouse Mobile Phone If you are seriously considering taking your social media strategy to the next level, a good smart-phone is essential. I am not going to get into what is the best to use, in the past I have used an Android platform phone, an iPhone, and several Blackberries. Currently, I am back on a Blackberry 9700 and love it. All of them though are going to be more than sufficient and offer the same basic features: phone, camera, web, email, and the main social networks applications. The key is to pick what you like. For me, touch screens are hard to use, especially while trying to concentrate on other things. I am a button pushing type of guy, so I like the blackberry more for that simple reason.

Once you have a good phone, it will allow you to begin to participate on the social networks when you have a few minutes waiting on a client, or when standing in line at the Walmart to check out. Also, the ability to connect with consumers quickly & efficiently is priceless. I had someone once tell me that most consumers want to be responded to in less than 2 hours or they will move on to someone else. Having that ability to respond quickly and painlessly, even if it is just a response of: “I am in a meeting, let me call you later this afternoon” can do wonders for your business.

5. A Video Camera While this does not seem like a big deal, this one can be so crucial to a social media strategy. Did you know that YouTube is the second most searched site in the world? One of my favorite choices is a simple handy Flipcam. It doesn’t have to be a hi-tech machine or anything. These are fairly affordable at under $200.00 and by far are the easiest video cameras to use. Simply shoot the video, flip out the built in USB and connect to your computer. To give you an idea of how popular video is, I have 25 videos uploaded to YouTube that have received a combined 71,000 views!

These are just 5 of the tools I use on a regular basis to cash in on my social media investment. Implementing these tools into your social media plan will definitely help you to achieve your ultimate goal and turn these networks into income producers for your business.

Cashing In On Your Social Media Investment

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We are offering several opportunities this coming week to learn about using social media to grow your business. See below:

“How to Chug Google Juice AND Get 15 Years of Fame” – Monday, March 1st – 1-3pm Eastern

The primary topics for our class will be:

How to write posts on your blog to increase your inquiries (and sales)
How to get Google and other search engines to pay attention to your blog
Dominating Google for your desired keywords
What a longtail keyword is, and how it can send you oodles of potential business
How to garner more subscribers and a loyal audience for your blog

In essence, your blog should serve as your “home base” online with any social media marketing plan. With that in mind, we can help you shape your blog into a cozy and fun place to hang out.

How would it feel to see other people start to spread your content and writing around to their friends?
What are your goals with regard to blogging and social media? This session is an absolute must for anyone who is new to blogging, or to anyone who feels that they aren’t optimizing their efforts with their blog….yet. We promise to share what has worked well for us.

Register here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/581158260 – Cost is $60 – use discount code “facebook210” for $10 off

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“Cashing In on Your Social Media Investment” – Tuesday, March 2nd from 2-4pm Eastern

During our (approximate) two-hour session, Jeremy Blanton and I will share a number of items that will help you to better leverage your online marketing efforts.

For the upcoming class, we will be providing lots of details on specific tools that we have used to make it easier to engage with others. We can also show you some tricks using Twitter and Facebook to connect with others in your geographic area and to find potential clients. We will also cover Flickr, YouTube, and Posterous.

We will be discussing the following topics in a fun, laidback atmosphere:

How to effectively listen in order to identify potential clients
How to add valuable content to engage with those around you
Some basic “etiquette” for Twitter, Facebook, and blogging
Techniques for promoting yourself and your events

Register here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/581176314 – Cost is $60 – use discount code “facebook210” for $10 off

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If you’re interested in taking both classes, we are offering a package deal for just $90 for all four hours of training. Please email me directly at jason@210consulting.com to take advantage of this deal.

If you’re unsure about paying for the classes right now, but you want to get a taste for our teaching style at 210 Consulting, you can also check out our FREE 45-minute webinar this Thursday at either 12:30pm Eastern or 1:30pm Eastern.

The topic this week will be “20+ Social Media Tools for Your Business”. Seating is limited to 25 people per session. If you’re interested in the free sessions, simply fill out this form and we’ll be in touch with more details soon:

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