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Does your camp have open houses, city visits, home parties, etc? If so, you should be marketing them on Facebook. Here are a few quick tips for your camp to market an event successfully on Facebook. 1. Create a Facebook event with fun photos and information on the event 2. Add multiple admins and ask them to invite friends to the event 3. Invite fans in the event's location to your event 4. Encourage your fans to invite their own friends to the Facebook...

Snapchat for Camps

Posted on October 28, 2013

in Social Tools

Snapchat is a very cool real-time photo chatting app on iOS and Android. According to Business Insider, they have 350 million photo uploads DAILY. It may still seem like a little app to a lot of people, but the growing popularity among middle and high school aged students is something that most marketers (including camp marketers) can not ignore. I always like to look toward big brands for advice on what smaller brands should be doing when a new social medium...

When should I start my social media efforts?

Posted on October 25, 2013

I get asked every single day by camp directors about the right timing for starting their social media efforts. The answer to this really depends on the camp and situation, but my answer always is "the longer you wait, the more you will miss out on." What I mean by that is: You will be missing many opportunities to promote your camp by not having a social media strategy in place You won't sign up new campers using these innovative channels that...

Pinterest and advertising for summer camps

Posted on October 23, 2013

in Social Tools

Last month Pinterest announced that they will be starting to provide promoted pins (also known as ads). They are currently testing this with a few companies and promoted pins will only show up in search results and category feeds. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before this is open to everyone and available in the Pinterest news feed. Of course, this is exactly how Facebook started out, first allowing a few promotions on their right hand side and...

If you could only do one social media activity, what would it be?

Posted on October 11, 2013

A lot of camp directors I talk to are VERY short of time. In fact, most of the times their entire staff is short on time. I totally understand that, which is why I am posting today about the ONE social media activity you must do. This means, if you are short on time that you shouldn't do ANY activities except for this one. It's better to do one thing very well then to have a mediocre Twitter/Instagram/Blog/etc. If you can...

Social Media Round Up For Camps: October

Posted on October 9, 2013

in Social Media Roundup

Here are some interesting articles on social media and summer camps from this past month! Mashable: Facebook has a quarter of a trillion user photos!! (How is your camp maximizing on the photo sharing capabilities of Facebook?) Huffington Post: A cute blog post about the Marriott family and their time at summer camp. Social Summer Camp: A blog post I wrote on "marketing" as a bad word and how camps can fulfill their missions in the world. Digiday: What to expect from Instagram ads. New...

Executing and measuring your holiday plan

Posted on October 2, 2013

In the last week I've covered how to develop your holiday marketing goals and how to create holiday-specific messaging that maps back to your goals. All of this is great, BUT if you don't execute on your plan and measure your success none of that will matter. Executing your plan should be pretty simple because you know 1. what your goals are and 2. what messaging your want to use to reach your goals. Usually executing on your holiday related...

Creating holiday-specific messaging

Posted on September 30, 2013

I love the idea of creating holiday-specific messaging for your camp. Most camps have a good brand voice, but don't often change their brand voice to focus on timely events. We talked yesterday about how to set long-term and short-term holiday goals for your summer camp. Once you have completed that, it's time to figure out what messaging you are going to use to reach your goal. Usually when creating messaging I recommend figuring out the following first: What three main...

Holiday planning for summer camps

Posted on September 25, 2013