Archives for : Instagram

My Practical Uses For Social Networks

Lately it seems like they have made a social network for just about every interest.  It can be cool but it can also be confusing and annoying to have to connect with your friends and associates in a dozen different places.  It is hard enough trying to keep track of everyone between Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin, which seem to be the networks people are more or less expected to have these days.

After I went through making profiles and taking the time to review all the major social media networks, I spent a little bit of time figuring out which ones actually added value and benefit to my life and business.  Part of the reason I use social media is to stay connected with people I care about, and part of the reason is to promote my projects, personal brand, and products.  So different social networks appeal to me in different ways.  Below is a break down of how I have been using social media to enhance my productivity in my personal life and also as a promotional tool for my businesses.

Facebook – I have 2 pages on Facebook; a personal page that I have narrowed down to under 1,000 actual friends and people I genuinely like to be connected with.  I also have a Fan Page that I made a while ago when I was doing speaking and webinars and had a lot of random people adding me.  I wanted to build my business audience but I did not want strangers knowing every detail of my personal life.  Now what I do is post all my brand related things to my fan page (promoting TV show, websites, business quotes, etc) and I post all my personal business to my personal page.  If I think a post is a crossover post, I first post it on my Fan Page and then tag my personal profile in it so it appears in both places.

vito glazers instagram

Since implementing my Instagram strategy, I have began increasing my following with very targeted users and getting business inquiries from it, click this photo to check out the tool for yourself.

Instagram – Instagram has  been a good promotion tool for my projects lately because it is easy to target like users based on hashtags.  I use a simple tool that likes photos based on hashtags all day long so it keeps my profile engaged without having to follow a lot of people i dont know or use any tools that may violate Instagram’s terms of service.  It gets me about 20 new followers a day.  My strategy is pretty simple.  I switched my profile to Private so that people can’t see my photos without sending me a follower request that I then approve.  This is so they have to follow me to see my photos. Then I type in a Hashtag that is relevant to the people I want to follow me. My tool likes their photos so they are notified and attracted to my profile where a certain ratio of them clicks my follow button.  Then, my strategy is when I post a new photo to Instagram, I approve all the new followers so they flood in and like and share my content which has been working out well so far.  Sometimes I share the content from Instagram to my personal facebook or tumblr pages.  I used to share it to facebook and twitter, but now I find that uploaded the content manually to Twitter and to my Facebook fan page, and then tagging it in my personal Facebook gets my the highest distribution of the content and best engagement rates.  If you haven’t already, take a look at my profile at http://Instagram.com/Vito_Glazers to take a look at how I have laid out my profile to attract curious users to follow my profile.

vito glazers twitter image with jeremy piven

As you can see, I have pretty much dedicated my entire Twitter to #MysteryMillionaire for now…

Twitter I no longer use for personal, only for promotional.  I have donated my Twitter, which was once by far my favorite social profile, to the TV show I am on.  During the Series Premier I used my Twitter to engage with everyone who was discussing the show and it was a very fun experience.  Since people didn’t necessarily know me from the show, the people tweeting were very open and candid about what they liked and didn’t like and I was able to get some really good feedback together.  I am going to try running paid tweets during the show in the upcoming weeks to see what kind of increase in followers and engagement rates I can achieve.

One Social Network I never thought I would get much use out of was Pinterest.  I have started using it for the practical reason of ‘pinning’ all my published articles onto boards so I can access them later on.  I also am looking for a way to use LinkedIn to target people to sell my social media consulting services to.  There is people hiring social media managers on Linkedin for $30,40,50K a year, they could get a much better value hiring me as a consulting for a few hundred a week and save on employment taxes, learning curve and have less of a commitment so I am confident once I can figure out a strategy on this network I know I can start bringing in some fees off of it.

I will keep this blog updated with new strategies that are working for me as I come across them.

 

 

 

How Instagram Helped Me Get on TV

I have been using this blog to keep my social media organized and soon I will start writing more about specific social media strategies I use to promote my personal brand and my businesses.

The focus is that social media has a lot of power behind it, and it is getting stronger every moment.  No matter what goal you are trying to achieve, having a successful social media presence is going to be part of achieving it.

I learned this in the past year, which has been one of the most interesting years of my life.  As I wrote on a previous blog post, I got into social media before social networks even existed and the place to congregate online was AOL and AIM.  I started building audiences on social networks when I was in the process of establishing my personal brand to promote my mainstream advertising network. Because I got into it early, and was doing a lot of things to get attention, I was able to build a sizable following online.  At one point I had a maxed out 5,000 friend Facebook account, a Facebook Fan Page with about 15,000 fans, four Twitter accounts with around 10,000 real followers (one for each of my businesses; @VitoGlazers, @CPATank,  @1WorldNetwork, and @HollywoodVineGroup now under new ownership), two Instagram accounts (one for myself and one for a concept I had called #CEOLife), and a variety of other social sites.  If I posted a video, even if it was poorly made, it would almost instantly get 1,000-2,000 views.  One of my biggest mistakes was not leveraging this nearly enough.

I didn’t know what to do with the audience, so first I figured I would go the business/entrepreneur coaching route.  I had been coaching affiliates online for a long time and thought this could be a cool transition into more notoriety and higher consulting fees.  Around the same time, I had the opportunity to meet and introduce former world leader Mikhail Gorbachev.  I really wanted to do something unique for this so I signed up to take public speaking classes from legendary speaker Bill Walsh.  In his class called Millionaire Speaker Camp, I learned a tremendous amount about public speaking and stage presence, and realized I had a natural knack and fearlessness in front of people that most people didn’t have.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Vito Glazers

Gorbachev and Glazers

A few weeks later I got to introduce and meet Gorbachev and it all went well.   Per the advice of my public speaking mentor, I opened with a famous Gorbachev joke told by Ronald Reagan a few decades earlier.  Gorbachev loved the joke and it was very well received.  It was a bold risk, but a risk that I am glad I took.  It was extremely well received, especially for an extremely conservative Evangelical Christian audience.  Someone actually video taped it and loaded it to YouTube where the video went viral getting over 40,000 views in the first few weeks of being online.

You can watch the video here:  http://YouTube.com/VitoGlazersCEO

I really enjoyed being in front of people and decided I wanted to get more into public speaking and spend less time behind the computer.  I had the opportunity to go on the road and fill in for a friend in Portland, OR who was giving a seminar on Facebook Ads, Twitter Management and Email Marketing, all subjects I was comfortable teaching.  I wanted to do more speaking about business and entrepreneurship but I figured Social Media speaking was a good way to get my foot in the door. I spent 3 days giving the seminar and it was well received.

Afterwards, I started realizing that the public speaking business may not be for me as it entailed a lot of selling from the stage, travel, training, competition, and other challenges that didn’t make it as appealing as I thought it would be.  I went back to work but still was interested in doing something bigger.  I continued to use my social media channels to project an image of myself that was attracting more business and continued to experience success.

One day around July 2013 I got an Email from a friend who informed me of an audition for a reality show about the Free Masons, a fraternity that I have been involved in for a few years, and a group that is consistently inappropriately portrayed in the media.  I met with the casting director and we hit it off and I became involved in the show, my first audition and I was cast!  It was very exciting.  Even though it was documentary style reality TV, I could tell it was something I was going to really enjoy.  We spent a week filming in Washington DC and around the East Coast and I had the time of my life.

A few months went by and the show never got picked up.  I got discouraged and went back to work again.  I started doing more and more social media consulting for companies in Los Angeles and tried to focus more on brands, celebs, creative projects and other things I found less boring than the products and clients I was serving at my network. I also started spending more time promoting “lifestyle” online through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine and a few other social media networks and was getting some positive and some controversial feedback.  The Instagram account for this project was growing quickly and more and more people began hash tagging my brand concept; #CEOLIFE –

I came up with the idea to do a webseries called #CEOLIFE which was going to be loosely based on some of the more excited behind the scenes action that happened at my company and in my life.  It was going to be a brief web series that focused on the ups and downs of the ad world and would be sponsored by companies within the industry.  My plan was to target people on Facebook, put the episodes on YouTube, and build an Email list to tell people when new videos were out so they would watch them.

Around this same time I had just moved back to LA and a friend of mine knew I was trying to get into production and TV.  The timing couldn’t have been better and I found out that a friend of his was casting for an actual Television show that was almost the exact same concept as my #CEOLIFE brand, except with a twist.  The biggest challenge with #CEOLIFE was that some it could be construed as distasteful to make a web series that revolves around flaunting wealth, during a recession.  The TV network’s concept was a very unique one which I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of.  6 millionaires, including myself, decided to go undercover to see if people treated us differently when we were out of our usual spoiled element.  How the show turns out, you will have to see for yourself, but it is a really great concept.

None the less, I think it is important to acknowledge how the modern world is changing.  If I hadn’t made an Instagram account and invented the uniuqe hashtag #CEOLIFE and shared it with people, it is doubtful that I would be coming out with my own Friday night prime time television show next month.  Although many people in the film and television business still do not give social media its due credit, it is an undeniable force in bringing lost views from the web back to TV, or creating a hybrid web+television user experience.

I find it interesting that social media is such a key part to why I was able to achieve my goal of getting my own TV show.  I plan on integrating everything I know about social media into helping ensure the show is a success.  My strategy includes creating unique content like Memes, Images and articles about the show, and distributing them intelligently across multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  I am really excited to be finally moving into a new industry.

I wrote an official wrap up of my affiliate marketing career and explained my transition into television on the Internet Codex Blog linked here: http://internetcodex.com/vito-glazers-life-affiliate-marketing-cpa-marketing-television/

It feels very positive to move into a new field and catapult to a significantly higher than entry level position.  Many people who want to do TV and Film start either as personal assistants or extras doing background work.  I was lucky enough to go on one audition and get cast in a show.  Although the pilot was never picked up, it gave me a lot of confidence.  I went to my second audition and got cast again, and this time the show got picked up and is finally being released.  I started promoting the show with the help of the network and already in the first week I received my first request to do a magazine interview and also received an invitation to possibly co-produce and star in another reality show about Men’s Fashion, another topic I frequently was bouncing around on my old #CEOLIVES account.  Anybody who doesn’t believe in the power of social media, I remind of this story of how I went from selling ads to being in my own prime time  TV show, all because of what I was posting on Instagram.

vito glazers mystery millionaire

Mystery Millionaire co-starring Vito Glazers premiers on @WEtv May 30th at 10|9c

The show is a great concept and I am really grateful and excited for all the people who I know worked really hard to bring it to life.  To help ensure the show’s success, I will be personally be creating unique content and promoting the show on Facebook.  I will also be doing a live #TweetAlong with the show every Friday night 30 minutes before the show airs and 30 minutes after to engage fans and bridge the gap between internet uses and television watchers; my goal is to give viewers a way to have a personal connection with the show.  I will also be posting behind the scenes footage and exclusive content on my new personal Instagram account.  If you want to see behind the scenes make sure you follow me on IG= Instagram.com/Vito_Glazers