GETTING. SOCIAL AT CAMP With the growth of social media,

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1 Online Presence GETTING by Jenna Frank SOCIAL AT CAMP With the growth of social media, advertisers and organizations have quickly EXPERT TIPS ON MARKETING WITH SOCIAL MEDIA realized the importance of utilizing social marketing as a tool to promote, to gain traction and to build awareness. But what does it take to generate a strong presence in a creative social campaign? 20 October/November 2017

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3 WHILE IT MAY SEEM LIKE SOCIAL MEDIA IS A BIT OF A FREE-FOR-ALL, THERE ARE KEY STRATEGIES THAT SHOULD BE EXAMINED AND EXPLORED FOR MAXIMUM EFFECTIVENESS AND REACH. When it comes to digital marketing, there are a lot of elements to take into consideration to craft a campaign that will be most effective. Aesthetics, tone and timing all play a factor, and each social platform has different strengths and weaknesses that can be examined and used to reach key audiences. While it may seem like social media is a bit of a free-for-all, there are key strategies that should be reviewed and explored for maximum effectiveness and reach. Know Your Audience To get the strongest engagement out of your digital audience, it s important to understand the voice that will resonate with whom you re speaking. A teen demographic will respond differently than a young (K-5) or college-age audience, and certainly, if you re targeting parents of campers you ll want to consider what is most appealing to them. With graphics, whether static or video, it is important to come up with a design that is eye-catching to the age group you re reaching. For example, for younger campers and parents, a series of activity graphics or videos might work well. While for a teen using social media without parental supervision, trending topics, calls to action, and attentiongrabbing content may work better (e.g.: memes, reaction GIFs, etc.). Your social campaign is a perfect place to test new looks and ideas, as you get almost immediate results from your users about what is working and what is not. Measure and Adjust Each social platform provides insights into your social performance when registered as a page or business. The insights page can help you determine your most engaged audience, the highest traffic times, and what types of posts are garnering the highest engagement and reach. The ideal posting time would be at the start of your high traffic window. Posting frequency is also something to take into consideration. Pages that are rarely updated will decline in followers and Photos courtesy of Camp Hebron

4 engagement. On the flip side, overposting or over-saturating will also generally result in a loss of followers. Social media is always shifting and changing. It s important to stay on top of current trends and platform-specific updates that can be used by your camp or conference center. For example, in recent years we ve seen a substantial shift in video engagement vs. static images. Once video assets became easily accessible, we saw many social media pages leverage these to promote their brand or product. For your camp, remember to keep videos relatively short (a minute or less) when possible to keep viewers engaged longer. Videos that are front-loaded with eyecatching content will also perform better. As you develop your creative assets, focus on quality. Social media feeds are saturated with so much content. Beautiful, creative, clever, fetching content will yield higher results than poorly executed creative. (Learn more about video marketing on page 30.) Investing in a Social Strategy When it comes to putting any sort of money behind an asset, you want to take into consideration your reach and engagement on current posts. Take an inventory of the posts on your camp s page and see what has garnered strong engagement and then invest financially in that piece or create another piece with similar messaging and tone. Boosting a post can be money well spent and may drastically increase your demographic reach and follower count. If you choose to put money behind something and realize that it isn t performing well, don t hesitate to pull the boosted post and put it behind another piece. Often, the way a paid post performs within the first 24 hours is a EXTRA INFO HIGHEST PERFORMING POSTS BY PLATFORM Understanding what works best where Facebook tends to see the highest performance with video assets. You can t post a GIF on Facebook without going through an outside platform such as Giphy. However, this is likely to change with the introduction of organic GIFs to Facebook. At this current time though, mp4s see the best performance, and generally, a video that is squared (1:1) or vertical (9:16) will outperform a landscape (16:9) video. Stay up on changes on Facebook through their Help section. On Instagram, the opposite is true. Static images still tend to outperform video on this platform. Instagram started out as a place to share static images, and that audience has remained faithful in its engagement. While we see a growth in video performance, the platform still lends itself to strong static graphic performance. Instagram Stories, a newer endeavor, is consistently resulting in more views and engagement per video than Snapchat. Snapchat provides a compelling platform. To gain leverage here, paid media or an engaging Snap Story seems to work best. It s difficult to track insights on Snapchat, so you are reliant on viewership. Stories should be fun and entertaining and should take advantage of stickers, geo-tags and filters where relevant. You can also create your own geo-tag for a relatively low cost (generally $5 $18 depending on location, run time, etc.). This is an excellent way to create a unique tag for your campers to use. Twitter is a unique space for social marketing, especially if you re targeting parents or business and ministry leaders. The popularity of hashtags and trends on Twitter gives your camp the ability to create a viral marketing campaign. If you are in a position to put advertising dollars behind creative, Twitter tends to see a high performance here. For example, if your audience is primarily adult-focused and you can jump on a trending topic on Twitter with a graphic that can tie into the topic as well as camp, this would be a great time to put a bit of money behind your assets. Jenna Frank October/November

5 Jenna Frank works as a digital manager for film and television in Los Angeles, California. She has over 10 years of ministry experience as a creative producer, providing a faithbased context for her role. She focuses on social campaigns for movies from the creative stage to implementation to help clients grow their social media platforms by creating engaging content. strong indicator of how it will perform overall. It can also give you a deeper read on the type of content your users want to see and what isn t working. Sometimes you can think that a campaign should be moving in one direction and after a few paid posts realize that you need to shift directions slightly. Create a social media calendar that maps out which audiences your camp wants to target during which seasons. Then watch what is getting the most attention and lean into that concept and messaging. For instance, think about targeting parents of campers during the fall through spring when registration opens for summer camp. Tweak your targeting to teens and campers during the late spring through late summer, highlighting the experiences campers are having. You won t lose the parents during this season, but you will likely pick up some campers as followers. Should You Share Content? Organically posting any video asset or other creative to your page will almost always outperform a share from another page. That being said, shares are an excellent way to get content in front of new eyes, but sharing it to your page will not gain as much engagement as an organic post. The audience is always growing and adapting and introducing new elements. Social platforms are ever evolving, and being willing to take calculated risks can yield great results for your camp or conference center. You ll find that social media is the most flexible of your marketing strategies allowing you to read in real-time how you re doing, modify your approach, and see very quickly if it was successful. Take advantage of this by posting about activities happening right now at camp. Enlist followers to vote for, support and share content around an event at camp tonight. Share what God is doing today on your property. That s the beauty of the medium it s social and immediate: The perfect combination for a vibrant ministry like camp. l EXTRA INFO WHAT IS SNAPCHAT? Explaining this unique social media platform Snapchat remains a bit of an enigma in the social media world. Over 60 percent of users with smartphones have Snapchat, and the average ad receives up to a million views per day. The millennial demographic accounts for approximately 70 percent of Snapchat users. This indicates that young people still find this platform of social media relevant, and therefore, it should continue being utilized. Snap has gone through a major rebranding over the last few years. While the disappearing photos and videos it was originally known for are still a primary feature, the platform was the first to introduce Stories, where one can document their day through images that remain for 24 hours. We have seen that this can be a great tool for camps and businesses to showcase events, people, etc. more casually. Many things can be leveraged here: 10-second trivia games, interviews or fun announcements with Snap filters. A bigger benefit would be a Snap geo-filter that can easily be created and purchased for a relatively low cost depending on the location and run time. This filter would give added recognition of your camp and its activities. Snap users enjoy taking advantage of geo-filters on their snaps, as it allows their followers to identify where they are and what they re doing. Snapchat is a trickier platform than others as its functions are multifaceted, and insights are harder to access. However, because it is a bit more informal, it allows you to use full creativity and think outside the box in engaging your audience. It s a fun way to make a more personal connection with users. Jenna Frank 24 October/November 2017