The Video Wizard

One of the biggest problems with social media websites like Facebook and Twitter is that your activity can be flushed down the drain immediately.

The risk you face when spending time on social media websites to interact with the community is that your comments and updates are lost within the stream of information that never stops moving. Everyone is updating their information on Facebook and often when you post a status update it may only be visible in your network for a couple of hours, or a day at most.

So how can you get around this problem?

A great strategy to do this is post links, photos or videos that people will comment on or ‘like’. This is only specific to Facebook, I guess you could say the reflection of this on twitter is a retweet or RT.

If you have something to share that generates ‘social reactions’ on Facebook, this content is highlighted to everyone that is somehow connected to this content. This means if someone in your network (be it a friend or a fan) comments or likes your post, this will be shared in the highlights section of everyone connected to all of that person’s friends.

So this is a great way to get your content out to people outside of your network, and a very effective way to build your online presence and value within your community.

You’ll notice in the image above that I’ve highlighted the links to the Hitler video and The Wizard fan page. Both of these items in someway promote what I can do for potential clients so this has a direct relationship with my business and generating more awareness of my brand and services.

Notice how the top highlight in the screengrab is the Hitler video – you’ll see this has the most ‘social reactions’ which has positioned it at the top of these results.

The more ‘social reactions’ you get, the better positioned you’ll be in the highlights section of Facebook. This is like being top of the search results in Google, except with public approval that your content has great entertainment value.

There is great value in posting content that may be purely for entertainment value (sneezing pandas, dramatic squirrels etc). Like the news and media, you should be looking to posts links, photos and videos that get people’s attention and have some value for your audience. Aim to get a reaction with everything you post, and if you can, make your content build your brand values and create more awareness of your products / services.

The more value you can create online within your network / community the more attraction you can create towards your business. Great value content will also accelerate the growth of your fans, friends and followers online.

So consider when you are getting involved with social media marketing how you can get exposure in the highlights section. Constantly updating your status is one way to get exposure but this can be shortlived and have little ‘viral’ potential.

Hope that saves you from wasting your time trying to market yourself on Facebook by updating your status three times a day – it is important to keep this updating (most people say on a daily basis) but there are smarter and more effective ways to generate exposure through Facebook.