This is a very comprehensive list by Entrepreneur Magazine. The biggest reason in my book is #7 in their list: using Facebook to create brand evangelists for your company. While Yelp may be a place for people to complain about a business, you will rarely find anything negative posted to a Facebook fan page. Fan pages are a place for fans to rave, so you’re missing out if you don’t provide a place for them to do that.
THE UNLISTED TIP #11: One tip that wasn’t mentioned is the power of creating a vanity URL for your Facebook page. What is that? I’m glad you asked. A “vanity URL” is a customized web address you can give people so they’re able to go directly to your facebook page. For example, I include in my email signature a call-to-action that reads, “Become a fan of us at http://www.facebook.com/missionmedia. To create a vanity URL, first you’ll need to obtain 25 fans (not hard to do if you invite all your friends of your personal profile and any previous clients). Once you have 25 fans, you’ll be ready to register a vanity URL for your Facebook page and start promoting it around town.
You could spend weeks reading about how to research the best keywords and $100’s of monthly fees testing all the keyword tools out there. Because the rules of internet marketing are always changing, it’s probably not the kind of thing someone can master overnight. If you’re not able to afford a company that specializes in SEO services, my recommendation for choosing keywords yourself is 3-part:
Use Google’s free Keyword Tool to search for keywords that could appeal to a niche audience and start building your list.
Pick keyword phrases that are specific and avoid adding words to your list that are too general. General keywords/phrases will most likely be too competitive for you to make it to the first page of search engines and will be too generic to drive qualified leads anyway.
Incorporate the keywords from your list into your YouTube video’s title, description and tags. Note: if you’re adding a hyperlink in your description, be sure to include the full URL (including the “http://”) so it will be clickable, and remember that viewers will only see the first 4 lines of your description before they have to click the “More Info” link.
I’m often asked by collegues and clients what is the best format to upload to video sharing sites like YouTube. For a long time, the best format was .m4v (or MPEG-4), which is a file type designed with compression for iTunes and mobile devices. But wait! YouTube recently increased the max file size you can upload from 100MB to a whopping 2GB. What’s that mean for you? Whether you’re shooting in SD or HD, you can now get away with putting as little compression on your video as possible before uploading to YouTube. For more details, check out this posting from YouTube’s technical support: Optimizing your video uploads.
I’m proud to announce that I’ve officially given ustream a try and we did a live stream of a meeting last night for Media Communicators Association International on the topic of Green Video Production. Check it out below to see. We took things a step further than the typical video stream by lifting the camera off the tripod for a video tour of Brent Altomare’s studio during the first part of the meeting so he could share with us the green initiatives he’s taken with his company.
While the tour happened, our live audience was able to watch from their seats as we projected the ustream website onto the wall where they were sitting. After the tour was finished, we switched the projected image to our wiffiti.com wall. Wiffiti is a site that allows people to create a custom wall for people to tweet and text in messages that will pop up in real-time (almost).
Special thanks to Jim Staylor for his excellent Glidecam skills for the shooting of this footage.
A Philly business owner harnesses the power of Yelp
I’ve spoken to other business owners who say they get half a dozen phone calls from people every week who were referred by Yelp. In this video, a restaurant owner in Philadelphia says that 40-60% of his business comes from Yelp and that when you google his company, his Yelp page shows up higher than his own website. I also really liked what the owner had to say about specific things he does to use Yelp as a tool for better customer service.
