Thanks to everybody joining in today for our Drive More Visitors and Bookings with Social and that social media. RV park social media tips is what we're talking about today. Those of you here now, thanks for coming and if you're watching on the replay, thanks for tuning in as well.
As always, love to have any questions you might have. Whether they're here now in the chat or in the comments later, please drop them.
About Rest & Relax ROI
A little bit about us as we get started. We do partner with RV, parks, resorts and campgrounds. ARVC member, proud to be doing that.
We talk about the M5 a good bit, which is our RV Park centric marketing system. We have these four areas that we talk about as well. Reputation, resell, research and retarget. Today's social media is a little bit more on the reach side of things. Framework is what we just talked about.
A little bit about myself. I grew up in West Virginia. It was a working sheep farm and a campground. And I'm sure everybody else has that same story. I studied comms at the world's most exciting university, Liberty. That's what they claimed. Our football coach just left for Auburn. That's exciting. That means we had a pretty good season.
I married my college sweetheart Jenny in October 2000. So, 22 years for us. Got four amazing kiddo. Elena Kay will be turning 18 next week, a week from today. Then I have three more right after that two years apart all of them, we have a lot of fun.
Almost all of them are teenagers. We do have the one doggo. Holly and I've been helping companies with their online presence for more than 20 years. A little bit about me right there. This agency thing has been going on since 2014, as well.
What You'll Leave With
Today we are looking at what we'll leave with. There's three areas that we will cover social media and that can help drive more bookings for you. The actual information you can leave with today. We always like to have stuff that you can walk away with and make a difference. If you do have questions, like I said, I'm glad to answer those.
Social Media Stats
Here's some stats to just start the conversation off. If you haven't realized, social media is kind of a big deal. I don't know about the rest of you all, it wasn't a thing at all growing up. But now we have more than 3.5 billion active users. When it comes to professional users, 90% of marketers are saying that it's increased exposure to their business and 75% say it increases their traffic.
71% people that have had a good social media experience are likely to recommend. That's a healthy chunk of folks that will run across your profiles. 74% share video content from brands on social media. That should be a little bit hint about how you can be using social.
Opportunity to Socialize
We're not gathering around the campfire here like these guys. We can do it online and create real human connections. We'll see that as a reoccurring theme is what we're talking about.
Also, it can allow us to become a thought leader. Even though that might not be a huge thing to think about as a park, it's still good. Everyone's got great experiences and expertise they can share and you can do that for your park as well. Beyond that, we're talking about being top of mind with our guests, obviously being active, being there for them to find us even though they stayed with us, we would like for them to come back. That's a great way to do that.
It is a key part of managing a reputation. If you've ever been on one of our other webinars, reputation keeps coming up and it is beyond a review only. We want our online presence to always be establishing our reputation and maintaining it and improving it. Social media is one part of that.
You can also learn a good deal about your guests through real time data. The way they interact. There's different things that you can track and look at in real time to understand how they are operating online. Also keep an eye on your peers and your competition. You can learn from that. If you're not already doing those type of things, definitely want to implement those.
Is It Broke? Fix It.
We always have a junkie little RV that we want to fix. He's sad, he's out of commission. Don't let that be your social media presence. Many know that it's a good idea, but not everybody really knows how to leverage it successfully.
Here's some common things that we can encounter when talking about these things. Unrealistic expectations. Okay? That's across the board for all of life, right? Same goes for social media. It's not an overnight success and I'm sure many would realize that already. Keep that in mind.
Trying to be on every network. Now, we will touch on several of them here. That not mean that we recommend that you do all of them because you need to find the one that's right for you, or the two or three maybe.
Being obsessed with yourself, this is another life lesson. Let's not always be about ourselves. The same thing goes for how we run our social and afraid to spend a little. You don't have to empty the bank per se to get some success on that, but just be aware that that can also be helpful.
Using the wrong tools, that's always a problem no matter what you're doing. And once again, these are all life lessons. Don't use the wrong tools and that can be very helpful.
Ignoring your guests. Once again, there's some reoccurring themes that will try to hammer home today. Hopefully, those are the things that you will take away when you're out there on social and they're communicating with you one way or the other. Please don't ignore them.
Social Media Basics
We got some basics we're going to cover right here. This strategy for social media, it includes everything you want to do and achieve on it. That should be pretty straightforward to understand that. For small businesses and for parks and the like, some of the things you want to do is build your audience, build long term relationships, and of course, increase your revenue. That can all be supported by your strategy.
As we alluded to, it's not something that happens overnight. It does require consistent and strategic approach. That's a little bit of what we're going to talk about today as we continue on.
Why Is It Important?
You're here and you're watching this either now or later, and you have some idea about that of course. One of the things that it does is increase your brand awareness. It can drive traffic to your website, help you promote content, and then, like we said before, understand your guests better and help them find your park potentially.
The interaction with the guest is big. Keep you a step ahead of your competitors. There you go. Some important points about that.
Here's the three main things we're going to address today. Let's call it the set up portion, our content that we're doing, and then lastly, how we engage through social.
Set Up Social Media
Let's get right into setting up. This person is happy that she set up her social media the correct way. Before you begin. This is before you set up, sort of and this is kind of mentality. It's a preparation. Identify your audience, know who it is that you want to interact with. I know there's different parks and the resorts kind of go across the board. Some are family or some are 55 plus. There's many different options out there, so not everybody is going to be the same.
That's important when you are starting your strategy for social media. We're talking about this once again, this is going to be how one of our points that we hammer home, show your human side, seek relationships and not followers. That kind of goes right in line with that being human. It's not just about the numbers. We want to make sure we are connecting in a real way.
Create an editorial calendar. This is great. Maybe you're redoing what you've done or maybe you never had a plan and you want to get a better one. This is a great way to do that. Take some of the things we talked about today and then make a real plan on how you're going to use this content and share it over the long haul.
Automate the right way. At one point in social media, there were some things that we had like automated responses if someone were to direct message you, some of those things don't fit what people are looking for. Those are maybe not the best things to do, but scheduling with the editorial calendar and those kinds of things, that's a definite great way to automate.
Of course, this is great across all different parts of business. Focus on helping over selling. Same thing for your online social media and optimized for engagement. Everything you're doing, you want to make sure that it has the ability for you to engage easily throughout your profiles. This is another reoccurring theme that we'll talk about is staying active. It's not a set and forget it type of marketing activity.
Optimize Facebook for Business
We're going to talk about Facebook for business and some things that you want to optimize. Make sure these are done on your profile, on your page.
Your page details. There's a few key things that you want to make sure are done. There's a custom URL. Make sure that your brand, your park, you're utilizing that so that's easier to remember potentially if someone just off the top of their head wants to try to find it, it's just great branding to do that.
This is another reoccurring theme we're going to have. If you haven't done both of these things with the profile and cover photos, nearly every social media platform will have those. You want to optimize those to reflect who you are. And the cover photo is a great way to highlight certain things about your park and have that changed up occasionally.
Make sure that description is complete and as thorough as it can be. And don't forget the website. If you have it, you don't have a website, shame on you. It's a big problem. But anyway, make sure that's also added on all of these for that matter and then select the right page.
CTA - call to action. There's a button that you can activate and make sure that that is set up correctly. There's different things you can have that say and maybe one of them that might be useful for you is book now, something along those lines.
Add page tabs to promote your park features. These are more like custom parts of your Facebook page that you can highlight different things and then you can also do seasonal services and things of that nature.
Enable your reviews. Everybody knows we use this day in and day out for our own lives, right? We're always looking at what other people are saying. If you have it turned off for whatever reason, that doesn't inspire a lot of trust. To make sure that's on.
Once again, update and engage. This is one of those points we're going to keep talking about. Make sure that if you're going to have it, use it.
Optimize Instagram for Business
Instagram, which is a Facebook or a Meta property. Once again, the profile photo that reflects your park. Make sure that the category that you have is the correct one. There's some different things out there. I didn't even get a chance to look that up if there's one specifically like RV Park Resort or things like that. But get as close as you can whatever is your particular business.
Make sure you got that contact info filled in correctly. The action buttons that you'll be able to do as a business profile as opposed to you might have set up something as an individual. Definitely recommend that it would be switched over to a business account as opposed to individual or personal. Then you can use these target keywords in your description. Know your audience and maybe the types of things that they would be looking for include those in the description.
Then a CTA, once again, the call to action before the link to your website or latest offer. A lot of people will use something like LinkTree to send people to multiple calls to action. We ourselves do that type of thing. But if you wanted to be a little bit more focused on one thing, maybe you just want to talk about people being able to book or maybe there's a special offer, video or something that you're doing for the time being. Call that out and then have that link. Another neat thing you can do to bring a little bit of life and flava into your profile is line breaks, emojis custom fonts that you can put in that bio.
Optimize LinkedIn for Business
We're going to talk about LinkedIn for business. We reiterate that you don't necessarily and we don't recommend that you do all of these. The people on LinkedIn oftentimes need to take a vacation. They just don't work all the time. It's not a bad idea to potentially use LinkedIn and a business page.
There's the profile cover images. You want to optimize those on that page. The about us section - make that compelling and use those relevant keywords there's. Basically anything that you put on the Internet that has some level of content or copy more than likely is going to be able to be searched by search engines on some level or within the platform itself. That's why we bring out the make sure the keywords are there. How are people going to find you that are looking for what you have to offer?
You have the ability to post like you would the other social media. You can do that regularly. That's once again, if you're on there, use it.
There are some ways you can grow your audience. It's more than what we have listed here, but you have so many invites every month. You can just invite as many of your connections as possible. Then there's the ability to target different things. This is not a paid feature within the region or the industry when you do a post. Look into that as well to grow your audience.
Career page. I think this is obviously LinkedIn started as mainly what people used it for was resumes and things of that nature. of course, finding good people is important for any business. Build out a page that maybe can help you find those folks to help run your operation.
You can also build service pages to talk about, like we've said, for the other profiles that you would have the different features and services that your individual park would have. Another fun thing that you can do with LinkedIn is host virtual events or just basically kind of like a live video. Potentially could do something like a park tour or you can just think of a lot of different ways you could use that as a different way to connect with people and show what you have at your location.
Optimize Twitter for Business
Twitter has been in the news for some reason recently. There's been a lot going on over there. I think it's higher usage than ever. If you want to use it, definitely it's still an active platform.
Craft your bio with care. Kind of what we've been saying before. There's keywords, there's different things that you can be found for the profile. Cover images, again, every single one of these are important to optimize. If you want to create the same type of one across all of you, if you have two or three of these that you're using primarily. You can always customize it to the actual platform. If you have something that you really want to push across all of your marketing, you can make sure that that cover image reflects that if you're doing like a special event or something of that nature.
Then you want to point people to a specific page on your website, for instance book now. You have the link in your bio, that's also a good thing to do. Of course, being a location, adding that to your profile is helpful. You want people find you as a business, I think that's a great thing to do. A lot of people are using it as individuals, so that's not something they care about but as a business it's great.
If you get everything set up and no one can see it because their tweets are protected, that's not a good thing. So make sure that's not the case as a business. Engage on that direct message. We talked about it already. When you have guests talking with you, you want to make sure that you're getting those and responding to them.
You can do this not only on Twitter, but pretty much every other one has this capability to pin the latest or not the latest, but whatever post you want to. If you have something, maybe you're in the news or special event, whatever the case may be that you want people to see first when they come to your profile, that's a great feature as well.
Optimize TikTok for Business
What about TikTok? Definitely more and more businesses have been using this over the last couple of years or so. Take a look at that and see if that matches who you are and who you want to reach now. It's not just young people, young folk. I know there's plenty of people in my generation and older that do a lot of scrolling on TikTok. Make sure that you're creating unique and relevant content if you're going to go down this road because of it should be that way across the board for any of them. But it's a little bit different than the ones that have been around for a while.
You want to avoid being super formal on TikTok. It's all about kind of like the fun laidback platform and then once again, it's another way to show your human side and not being super uptight.
Join a challenge. There's a lot of TikTok challenges that have gone across the internet last few years. That's a way to get in on something that might be viral and of that nature.
When you are creating posts, you can do this for a lot of different ones now. More and more like TikTok kind of led the way on the vertical video short content. It started out with vine, kind of really started all that, right? TikTok took over that and more and more of these, whether it's reels or shorts or all these different things that everyone's kind of mimicking these kind of things. Adding the music and the effects add to what you're able to do there.
Then there's some publishing features that you want to leverage. There are several things that you can do when you post. Of course there's descriptions and hashtags and things like that. Make sure that when you're doing those, you're using those to the best of your ability.
Then you want to monitor analytics. The reality is you want to be able to find a time that you think is going to get the most views. Everyone that deals with TikTok is concerned about the algorithm. There's algorithms for all the social media, right? I've seen jokes and different memes and stuff about trying to figure out how a particular TikTok will go off and then the other ones won't or whatever. You have analytics once you set up this stuff that you can look and kind of begin to learn about what's best for your park if you're going to use that.
User generated content is great. You can do this across all platforms, of course, maybe say #acmervpark and if someone shares that, then you can use that to repost on your profile, as well.
You can create your own challenge. Use your creativity, come up with your own TikTok challenge and run with it. You're in this industry that is about having fun with vacation and all that. Capitalize on that.
We've seen a lot of jokes about being an influencer, but this is definitely a place where you might be able to collaborate with one to help expand your brand on the next level. There's plenty of people that are into outdoors or vacation or even if you want to get down to, you can find people that are specific to the RV life. I'm sure there's plenty of those that you could potentially partner with. Look at teaming up with them to increase your reach.
Social Media Content
We're looking at our content now and so we're going to look at some content strategy. You want to set the goals for your new strategy and research your target audience. Once again, that's another thing we've talked about a few times in your platforms. We've already talked about that. Tracking. Whatever you are able to track, you can grow. Make sure that's set up when you're doing a content campaign and strategy, then what we've been talking about on some level is create that engaging content, we'll get more into that and then plan that content on your editorial calendar. Then because you've set up tracking, you can measure and improve.
Types of Social Media Content
These are some initial steps to be aware of and types of social media content. We're going to go over these or you should touch on one of these at least, if not more than one. When you're doing educational do How Tos or lists.
Inspirational. There's always great quotes and stories that people connect with. Being interactive with quiz and polls, that can be a great thing. The connecting type. Now BTS, we're not talking about the Korean boy band, we're talking about behind the scenes content. People love that kind of stuff. Connecting by thanking guests and many more things like that.
Entertaining. Memes, everybody loves that giveaways that could potentially do. Newsworthy, maybe something that's some research about what's going on in the industry or just industry news in general. Of course, promotional when you're going to actually put out something that people can get a coupon or maybe it's a freebie or other types of things too. This is like a post but more about an ads.
Social Media Content Examples
Some more content examples. These are specific for what anybody could do here. Promote your blog post. Obviously if you're creating that, make sure you're sharing those. Testimonials, make sure you're getting those and repurposed them as posts on whatever platform you want to use. Maybe you have a poll about your favorite vacation spots, something like that.
You can do a live video of like a holiday party or I know there's all kinds of events that we're always doing and that's a great time. You don't have to stream everything or whatnot, but maybe just glimpse. Get people the ability to see what's going on on your property.
Go out, get some videos of local attractions, things that why are people coming into the area and let them know about that. It doesn't have to be super production, high value. You can take your nice HD camera on your cellphone, shoot some short videos and share those.
Infographics. Creating something like "what to bring in your RV when you go on a road trip" or whatever else that you might think of. Create your own memes. There's plenty of things that meme creators out there that you can use, but these are things that you can do as well. Of course, quotes can do those just about anything but live camping, RVs, vacation or whatever fits your brand and park.
Common Social Media Mistakes
Here's some things to avoid for content quantity over quality. Just trying to like I know I need to do this, so we're just spend a little bit more time figuring out what it is and make it good.
Only landscape images. It's funny, a few years ago, it was like everybody was mad if you shot a video vertical or something. Now everyone's used to holding their phone vertically. Incorporate those as well.
We mentioned this briefly earlier, being obsessed with yourself. Only sharing your own content is a no no. Not getting stuff from your users is a mistake as well. Not using video content and then not targeting specific audience for your content. You're just kind of like shotgunning it. It's not a good idea.
Not boosting the right post. So what's the right post to boost? Reality is when you do something organically and it already catches on for itself and people share it and like it, that's the time to boost a post. Boost something that is already performing well and throw a few dollars behind it because it's already got momentum.
Social Media Best Practices
Do not post personal content. Hopefully everyone knows that. But we want to reiterate that. Stay away from controversial topics. There's a lot controversies that we could potentially talk about. Don't do it, that's all. No one's going to win in that.
Of course, keep sensitive info confidential to be careful about what's going out there and that could potentially be sharing information or taking pictures of for instance, children and all that. You've got to make sure that it's okay right before you do that if someone is at your park.
Avoid posting too often. There is a happy medium out there, right? Doing too much, doing too little. You need to figure out what's right for you. There's not a one size fits all for that.
Good grammar and spelling, that's another one of the life lessons. Just do that and it's better than winging in. Always be professional. That doesn't mean you have to be stuffy, but you still have fun with it, obviously. Of course, if you've said it once, say it again. Engage with your followers, please.
Social Media Advertising Tips
We'll throw this in here with some advertising tips. It's a little bit outside of just normal social media, but I wanted to throw in a few of these. Lean on your organic data. If you decide to do some advertising, you're going to build that off of what you've learned about your regular posts.
Once again, user generated content is great to utilize in your advertising campaigns. Always be aware of what this is going to be like on mobile and how that's going to you know, the reality is most people are going to be on mobile when they see your ad or post. Always be aware of that.
A/B test. That means when you do these ads, a couple of different versions at the very least to kind of see which one is performing better. Do that as well and use multiple campaign types. Every platform is going to have different kinds of campaigns. Test them out, find out what's working for you and you. Pair with search. What's going on with your search results and how those are performing. What you do with your ads should also just be pairing up together well with how you are doing on your organic search results and things of that nature.
Don't let your creative get stale. You might have had an ad that you ran for a while, it's had the same photos. It's easy enough on some of these to have just a recurring thing. It goes on forever and ever. We've probably all seen this where we log on to certain places and we see the same as the same picture. People get super tired of that. Don't keep the same photos all the time.
Social Media Engagement
Our last section is going to be engaging. We've already mentioned it as a very important part of the whole social media reality. So what is it exactly? It's just a measure of how people are interacting with your accounts and content. That's likes and favorites, comments, DMs replies, shares and retweets, reshares, saves, clicks, mentions. All those things are engagement that we all would love to have when we create social media posts.
Benefits of Social Media Engagement
There are some benefits. It's going to increase communication and interaction. It does have a limitless market potential. What's that? It's the ability to go viral with something and it boosts your website traffic once people are engaging. Increase your referral rate. The whole share something is essentially is a referral. Of course, it's going to lead to more obtained leads or bookings.
Increasing Social Media Engagement
Know where to find engagement metrics. Familiarize yourself with the platform of your choice. Make sure you know where to get the data and be aware of that and use it. Set goals and define your metrics. What are you trying to accomplish and be aware of that, as well.
Understand your platform itself. That kind of goes back to what I just said about finding metrics and all that. Just be as familiar with that as possible. Again, knowing your audience is very important. Then understanding the elements of an engaging post. Things like open ended questions and asking different things like that are engaging posts instead of just posting and forgetting it.
Create shareable content and know when to post on social media, which we talked about briefly, specifically TikTok. It goes across the board and the previous things we just talked about are going to help you understand when that is for your particular part and execute your strategy.
Social Media Engagement Tools
Here's some tools for engagement for social media. Canva. I think most people may be aware of this. We are an agency that has all the big tools like Adobe and all that, but we still use Canva and I know many people do. It's just great for being able to create like social media type stuff, photographs and even video.
We also have another one, Animoto that does videos. It's another option to be able to create great social media videos. Grammarly. If you have problems like we said earlier, make sure your grammar and spelling is good. That can help with that and also does beyond just that help you create good copy for your posts.
Unbox Social if you want to get deeper into your analytics and you can check those folks out. Scheduling we actually have a part of our tool allows you to do this. M5 Social Media Planner is one of those things that can do that. Gifs - that's an engagement tool. Who doesn't love a good gif?
Q&A
That wraps up what we're going to talk about today. We talked about set up, content and engagement. We want to see if there are questions on. We have a couple of chats here.
Regarding post boosts. Is it really worth paying to boost our pages? A large following and I already wonder if it's worth it. It definitely depends on that, right? And like I said before, know what to post if something is not working. If you post something, no one ever engages with it, why boost that. Across the board with all these platforms you can kind of spend as little or as much as you want. It's totally up to you. Very flexible and all that. Once you find one that's done well organically, we have seen how that really can go viral. There's viral go across all the world or there's viral go across your region or something like that. That's also valuable to you.
Asking for slides on the print. We can definitely share those with you. And obviously this is recorded and we put these up on video, but be glad to share them with you as well. So we have your contact information, I believe, so I can definitely get those over to you. All right, any more questions? You could drop those in.
You can always connect with us. We are glad to do that. We're talking about engaging. We love to engage with you on our platforms that we're on. Find us on these: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram.
Our Next Webinar
Next time we're going to talk about how to get more guests with online advertising. We touched on it briefly today, but we will go into further depth on what that looks like on Facebook and Instagram. There's a lot of crossover there, obviously, with them all being Meta. We'll go in a little bit further on that. Definitely like to have you join us again. Tell your friends and family about it.
Happy Trails!
That's going to be it for today. We really appreciate those that are able to join us and for those that are watching us at a later time, thanks for tuning in. Hope everyone had, this is the last day of November, so we just had Thanksgiving. Thankful for you all. Thankful for the ability to be able to jump on and do this and help people. Running into the holiday, Christmas season, Hanukkah, all kinds of things are going on. You guys enjoy all of that and until next time, happy trails!
