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Tag: How to Grow & Monetize Your Online Following

  • Snapchat Influencer Shares How To Leverage The App For Your Business

    Snapchat Influencer Shares How To Leverage The App For Your Business

    Many have scoffed at the notion of Snapchat seriously entering the business sphere. How could a self-destructing picture and video messaging app be profitable?

    With over 150 million active users and 10 billion daily video views, Snapchat is now overtaking both Twitter and Facebook in popularity.

    The mobile messaging app, currently valued at $20 billion, is rapidly becoming the go-to platform for millennials. More than 60% of U.S. 13 to 34-year-old smartphone users are Snapchatters, and their daily video views are tripling every 3 months.

    So how exactly do you get started?

    Meet Virginia Salas Kastilio, a Snapchat celebritywith a global following who’s made Snapchatting her full-time job. She’s partnered with brands like Nasdaq, Sundance, and Good Mag to promote their content and hook users onto their products.

    Salas Kastilio reveals her secret to leveraging Snapchat for business results on the latest episode of Unconventional Life, Learn To Master Snapchat: The Untapped Mega-Marketing Platform.

    Salas Kastilio is a trilingual nomad who has been to 15 different schools and traveled around the world. She hops from place to place every few weeks to keep a fresh perspective on things.

    After a five-year career in the corporate world working for Apple and Oracle, she decided to devote her life to the research and spreading of happiness.

    Salas Kastilio says she started using snapchat as a storyteller, filming micro-moments of her day that, when strung together, allowed her followers to feel like they really knew her.

    “I wanted to take people through my day and also show them it wasn’t an act, I wasn’t pretending… It was a personal way to bring people into my everyday life and interact with them,”Salas Kastilio says.

    Other Snapchat users resonated with SalasKastilio’s transparency — they could easily relate to her quirks, her humor, her flaws, and the everyday moments she shared. Her commitment to being herself and broadcasting her real life was what really caught on.

    At just 26 years old, Salas Kastilio has already touched hundreds of thousands of lives through Snapchat. Below, she shares how you can get started and create your own impact with this platform.

    Focus on 1-1 engagement. The beauty of Snapchat is that it enables you to connect with your audience one-on-one. Don’t be afraid to send personalized snaps to people who frequently watch your Snapchat “stories”, or have been a loyal customer, or who reach out to you first. This is how you build relationships and a positive reputation. “You can have really great marketing but if you don’t have engagement you have nothing. It’s all about 1-1,” Salas Kastilio advises.

    Be yourself. People want to see what you’re really like behind the public persona of your business. Take your viewers behind-the-scenes in a typical day at work, or at an event you throw. Allow your personality to come out so they can get to know you — they want to connect to who you are. Salas Kastilio says, “It’s probably one of the hardest things that we can do as humans, it’s just being yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’re passionate about or what kind of quirks you have, just show them, and the people that will resonate will find you.”

    Reach out to Snapchat communities. Locate groups on Reddit, Facebook, and other forums specifically created by Snapchat fans. Then join the conversation and invite them to send you a Snapchat. Salas Kastilio says, “I would post in the Reddit group and just be like, I challenge you to send me your worst selfie… may the odds be ever in your favor,” and people would send me terrible selfies and I would send them terrible selfies back. You know I would just think of little fun games to get people to find me.”

    Tell a story. The most watched Snapchat stories keep the viewer hooked from start to finish by showing a progression of events. Create suspense, add comedy, and do something surprising. You might even feature your products in your videos in a creative way. The more interesting your story, the more users will be drawn to your Snapchat and learn about your business that way.

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  • The Magic Formula Behind Going Viral On Reddit

    The Magic Formula Behind Going Viral On Reddit

    Have you ever wondered why a photo of a cat or video of a dancing baby goes viral on the internet for no apparent reason? You may be at work, on Facebook, or talking with a friend when someone drops the line, “Hey, you gotta see this video.” Next thing you know, you and everyone you know are stopped dead in their tracks to watch its magnificent glory, only to leave you moments later wondering what just happened.

    That kind of video is everywhere. No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape it. If you are like me, you may assume that these videos blow up by accident. That there is no magic formula for producing “viral” content.

    Brian Swichkow, Adweek’s “reddit marketing expert,” thinks otherwise.

    Brian built his business, Ghost Influence, an online community driving 7 million pageviews a day on Reddit, by cracking the formula behind how viral happens. His community, composed of people like you and me, is able to go into any market in any niche and make content go “viral.” According to Scott Stratten, the president of Un-Marketing, a “viral” moment happens when you achieve a “greater reach than your own. Viral isn’t a number, viral is simply going farther than you can reach.”

    Some of his past wins include: making a girl on Tinder world-famous by generating 25 million impressions to her profile picture in 72 hours, creating an online app where users register to receive the most “absurd email to give in a bar”, generating 11,000 pageviews and 564 signups in the first 30 minutes, and building his ex-fiancé’s dog a YouTube channel with 6,800 subscribers and 3.8M views.

    I caught up with Brian on this week’s podcast episode here, where he shares all of the details on how viral happens:

    Brian’s journey started in 2013 when he decided to run eerily targeted facebook ads to prank his roommate… for three weeks. Every few days his roommate would log in and see an ad revealing intimate details that only someone like a girlfriend or his roommate would know. After his roommate was understandable super freaked out, Brian ran one last ad saying, “Ever feel like your roommate is creating Facebook ads targeted to a niche of just you?”

    Notably one of the best pranks ever. After sharing the story with people, Brian decided to write this article as his first blog post to document the whole thing and posted it to Reddit. Seventy-two hours later it had garnered 450,000 views.

    Not only was it a great story but it was also great content. Brian carefully dissected piece by piece how he did it so, if you are a marketer, like me, you could learn about Facebook ads from reading what he did, while being super entertained.

    When I asked Brian his secret, he shared, “the key is to execute something unnecessarily well. You have to be committed to the joke or whatever you are doing. When I launched my ex-fiance’s dog’s YouTube channel, I never broke character once. Every time someone would comment I would respond only as the dog. When you do this, people pay attention and that is what makes you stand out.”

    Since launching the facebook prank article Brian has become obsessed with learning how Reddit works and how viral happens. He has found that “the key is to better understand what communities deem to be of value and how you can be the one to create or deliver that to them. It’s a bit like language immersion. By breaking down the structure of the platform and the psychology of the message in an accessible manner you will quickly become fluent.”

    Want Brian’s formula for making viral happen? Here’s how:

    Step 1: Curate or Create Valuable Content

    Reddit is a community platform where people follow topics that anyone can relate to. Unlike brand platforms like Facebook or Twitter, where someone subscribes to see all of your content, on Reddit if you don’t add relevant value to the conversation happening in the community (aka subreddit) you won’t get any traction.

    Step 2: Speak The Native Language

    Reddit is composed of over 9,000 communities (called ‘subreddits’) with each subreddit having its own dialect inside the community. Think about talking to people on the East coast versus the South. If you don’t say words like “soda or pop” you will seem like an outsider and create a barrier.

    Step 3: Give Before You Receive

    Think about Reddit like a relationship. You need to nurture it and let it grow before you ask for favor after favor. On Reddit before you share a post, make sure you are commenting, sharing your opinion, and adding value to the community before expecting something back in return.

    Step 4: Don’t Do A Hit & Run

    The most traction on Reddit comes from engaging in the comments and discussion happening after you post. It would be a tragedy to get the entire formula right, post in the right subreddit with the right language and then not engage with the people talking about it. You will leave thousands of potential views and traction on the table.

    Step 5: Enjoy Your Rewards

    Collect the traffic rewards from following the above framework that you can use over and over again to blow up content time and again.

    If you want to win a free 1 hour consulting session with Brian ($1000 value) listen to the podcast for details. Then enter to win here. Brian has made this offer exclusively to Unconventional Life readers and listeners.

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