Creating An Online Community To Market For You Without Asking

I think one of the biggest values to social media is the ability to connect with large online communities and form connections with little to no effort.  As I’ve traveled the country over the past few years sharing as a social media speaker, I love sharing success stories that either my clients or myself have experienced.  Anyone who has ever attended any of my sessions on WordPress or blogging has heard the example of the Brazilian steakhouse in town that I wrote a simple 15 minute blog post about our great experience and how it made amazing connections with this very popular restaurant in town.

Well, yesterday it happened again.  As I shared a few months back, I’ve recently ventured back into selling homes in Myrtle Beach.  Because of that, I’ve been trying to focus a bunch of time over the past few weeks on creating good video about the communities and the best things Myrtle Beach has to offer.  As NAR shared, that’s the types of video that will get watched much more than video about how great I am as Myrtle Beach REALTOR® or a video of a property I have listed for sale.

So before I go on, let me share the video I created.  It’s a time-lapse video of the SkyWheel in Myrtle Beach.  It has quickly become the icon of the Myrtle Beach skyline.

Pretty cool video right?  Well, here’s where it gets better.  Before launching the video I teased out to my Facebook community a still image of the video sharing about how I was testing out doing a time-lapse and hope it turned out well.  As I did that, I tagged the Myrtle Beach SkyWheel Facebook page which notified the administrator there that I had mentioned them.

Then, after the video was created and sent live I shared a link across social media driving people back to my blog post where I had embedded the video.  I could have just shared the link to the video and drove everyone to YouTube or kept the conversation going on Facebook, but my ultimate goal is to drive my traffic to my website that I own and can control to convert the traffic into leads.  Because I mentioned them again in this post with the link over to my site, the SkyWheel then shared this post to their 30,000+ fans on their facebook page:

Instantly, the roles reversed and they became part of my marketing team by sharing my content with their fan base of over 30,000 on their Facbeook Page.  I instantly watched the analytics on my site shoot up as traffic began to pour in from their fans.  

As you can see, the boost of traffic above was more than even what I could accomplish across all of my personal social network connections earlier in the day and almost five times the average amount of traffic that visits my site throughout the day.

So If you are trying to figure out ways to connect with other local businesses and get their social connections to learn more about you, take the time to pay it forward and share great things about others.  You never know, you might just go from being a person they never heard of to someone they are bragging about to their large fan base overnight without even having to ask.