RMV Episode 16: Social Media Content Strategy
Hey, welcome to resort marketing vids. What’s your social content strategy? How do you engage your members, and prospects, via social media?
If you’re like most resorts, and most small businesses in general, you have a simple strategy – Just wing it.
 But what if I told you, you could have…should have, a social media strategy that was more advanced than your tradeshow strategy?
 Look. Social media serves one purpose and one purpose only – Connection. You have Got to design your content strategy in a way that forces you, as a business, to develop a strong connection with people via social media, be it members, prospects, or just random people.
 You must design your content strategy to connect and build your brand with people who have never heard of your resort before. You’ve got to design it to reinforce the brand to people who are familiar.
 Let’s start with one piece of the puzzle, a testimonial. Most people would simply post it on facebook and stop there, saying little, to nothing, and expecting less.
 A savvy online marketer would take a different path. Decide that once a week you’ll post a member testimonial on YouTube, asking for comments. Schedule a time that same week to link to that video from Facebook, asking your members to submit more testimonials. Schedule another time that week to send a tweet to all your members thanking them for their testimonials, linking to one, and prompting more.
 I could go on, for example, transcribe that testimonial and post it as a blog post, or article on another account somewhere online, asking for feedback, or directing readers to visit the site or resort and see for themselves. But, you basically take the one premise, and that one piece of content, and spread it out to connect with as many people as you can, across as many mediums as you can, while strengthening the connection you have, and Always asking for some action to be taken by the content consumer in response.
 Now let’s go even deeper. You want to project the best image you can online, right? Put the best foot forward, so to speak? Well, part of your social media content strategy is back-links. Hyper-links, strategically placed all over the web to boost your presence in the search engines. It’s critical to include a link back to your website, or one of your other social sites every time you post new content. This creates a strong footprint for you online that projects an excellent image to prospects Googling you to see what you’re about.
 And that’s all just based on a plain testimonial. You should be going this deep with all your online content. Be intentional about everything you post online. Ask yourself that famous sales question, WIIFM, what’s in it for me? Figure out what posting that piece of content is going to mean for you, for the resort. What would you like it to mean? What would you like it to do?
 I don’t have to help you draw the obvious conclusion that you’d like it to help generate leads. Because as long as you have a tour generation site active online, you already know that structuring your social content like this helps drive traffic to that site. So, to draw this to a close, sit down with your team and workshop every thing you can do, with every piece of content you post, develop a posting schedule, and stick to it. You’ll be glad you did.
 Join us next week to learn about marketing your resort with local directories. I’ll see you later.