Social Media Tag Archive

Practical social media strategy for tourism based industries

A few days back I was asked by Bukidnon Provincial Tourism Office to talk on blogging and social media as an engagement tool for their provincial tourism office. Bukidnon provincial tourism office is composed of 20 strong municipal tourism offices each with their own set of staff. This office is also of staging the famous Kaamulan Festival, one of the truly ethic festivals I’ve seen in recent memory. If there’s a few take home points I want them to study and implement, these should it be.

“All right, stop, collaborate and listen!”- A Vanilla Ice-Ice Baby social media strategy.

Whatever you’re doing on social media now,

Stop:

Formulate a social media strategy

Whatever you campaign are- information drives, engagements, networking, promotions, feedbacks, the success of such activities depend heavily on a well planned social media strategy. This should be the first step. What constitute your social media strategy? The succeeding steps will tell you

Identify and roll out  measurable objectives

Are you going for an info drive? a promotional campaign? Tourism branding? Site feedback? Write it out clearly and make sure everybody in your team knows this by heart. Remember you can only measure what you’ve set out to do in the first place.

Identify your target audience

It’s pretty obvious who will be your target audience when you’re using social media as your channel of communication and feedback. While its true social media cut across age, gender, society or political boundaries, some are more accessible than others.  Digital natives are a lot easier to convince than technophobics.

Choose your social media channel and set up accordingly.

The social media channels is usually dependent on your objectives and target audience. Start with the 3 basic Social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter. Instagram then expand to other platforms once your are comfortable with it. I would also recommend a blog where to pour your content in. This should be your main platform where your audience will go to when they need more information on the campaigns you are staging.

Set up your metrics

If you are dipping yourself into social media engagements, you better be prepared to set up metrics for listening, monitoring and or measuring your campaigns.  These are all part of an efficient social media strategy. Would you monitor your brand? listen what your audience have to say about your campaigns?

Collaborate:

Publish and share useful content!

Whatever your social media platform is, content is king.  A well thought out and targeted content beats the crappy haphazardly posted content. Remember social media is about engagement not just promotion. The good thing about social media is that it can be your feedback channel too, and hence a very powerful tool to shape campaigns or revise a campaign plan.

Network with other like minded ambassadors

I cannot overemphasize collaboration and networking on social media. Aim for engagement. Brand your content, comment on various other platforms and introduce yourself if you are not yet known. There’s no shortcut to doing this.  Build the habit of engaging other like minded social media advocates whenever possible. It builds credibility and identity for your brand.
Measure using social media metrics

Listen:

While listening is part of the social media engagements metrics, it’s a good first step to amplifying social media strategy. Listening implies monitoring and monitoring means, your looking for telltale signals to improve your social media activities. It may be on feedbacks, what other people say about your campaigns, brands or site. When continuously done, it gives you an efficient and valuable tool to fine tune strategy, revise social media activities, or launch entirely a new one.

All this listening and monitoring is aimed at achieving and or sustaining engagement, the “holy grail” of social media activities. Wether it be brand loyalty, attention retention and so forth. Again the kind of listening and monitoring methods you should employ depends on your social media strategy’s objectives, the target audience or market, social media activities.  On facebook page for example, link likes, or posting comments mean more as a listening tool. On your blog a comment maybe a better way to monitor loyalty.

Measuring up success in social media is something a bit more of the end game. Knowing you’ve achieve (or not) something based on your predefined objectives is a bit new to social media activities but it definitely signifies a well thought out and efficient social media strategy!

van

(Vanilla Ice’s photo courtesy of AOLTV)

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How to make your advocacies rock, on social media

Years ago, I started writing online just for the love of writing.  There’s no definable goal, no strategy, nor any specifics to it. I just love to write. I was a kid who found one trendy eye candy thing to do. It’s called blogging and I was a blogger without a cause. My blogging mantra then was:

….

That’s right. I have no blogging mantra before. If you take a look at my social media profile today, this is my mantra:

I empower people.

So how did my wanderlust blogging evolved into this social media mantra of today? I’m not so sure but there’s two things on my side that made room for “experimentation”.

One is time, the other, I suck at writing. 

I was one of the few who started blogging when it wasn’t popular then. Ergo I had the luxury of squandering time just to write rhetorics and metaphors.  I had little regard for grammatical correctness so long that I could blog. Mind you, the whole content police is at your ass every time waiting to bust your ill constructed content. But, I didn’t care.

When facebook and twitter became king and queen online platforms, I still suck at writing. The thing though, king Facebook doesn’t really care how grammatically correct your status updates are.  Or, how sane your content is. It has its own algorithm, and facebook-ers really hate long posts like this.

Well, queen twitter even pushed further and set the character limit (of thoughts) to 140. That’s how many characters twitter thinks relevant content amount to. Insane? Yes, but it squeezes the freaking juices out of your creative mind. Grammars, notwithstanding .

When Google+ came in late and transformed itself into a rock solid social app to mean business, I began re examining finite resources and strategised my social media involvement. No one knows how or when will Google settle revamping its app, but I seriously thought about playing my cards right when it still owns the search engine mega empire to back its social media platform.

So again, how is mantra, writing, social media fell into place to supercharge your advocacy on social media?

I gave the following tips on #ChangePh social media day:

SOCIALMEDIADAY

No content marketing? No writing or grammar polishing? No SEOs? Surprised?! Cliche?

The most important thing I’ve learned over the years of gallivanting on social media is the underpinning of most technical tips and advices experts would tell me. Humans are innately social. Those who are rockstars on social media, tend to have superb human  rather than technical”skills”. So now you can see, the tips I gave above are really positive human traits and are easily likeable on social media.

If there’s one sentence I’d like my audience to remember, it should be this :

Be authentically, human on social media.

Heck, I still suck at writing. But I have an advocacy to empower people and that compulsion to never stop at being “okay” . I try to be authentic, with helpfulness as a fuel to this passion. Lastly, the social media animal should never be just online. In fact, the social media rockstars are those who bring humans into a “gathering” offline. And that’s  what social media is all about.

Being human, being social.

The author talking about social media on social media day #ChangePh #SMDayGensan #HEalthXPh #smartlife

The author talking about social media on social media day #ChangePh #SMDayGensan #HEalthXPh #smartlife

(This post is related to my talk on “how to make your advocacy rock on social media” during #ChangePh social media day in Gensan (#SMdayGensan) and is my contribution to #smartlife social media tips)

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Now, I know what you did on my birthday!

Last June 11, my birthday I asked people to post a good deed on my social media wall instead of the usual birthday greetings.

Last June 11, my birthday I asked people to post a good deed on my social media wall instead of the usual birthday greetings.

remoI hacked the idea the night before, thinking It would be more meaningful to know some people received random act of kindness from both offline and online friends. I owe these people bigtime. Made my birthday a memorable one.

Here are some the people who responded to my call for random kindness.

Awesomely thanks! All of these are on my Storify account.

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I know what you did on my birthday (A birthday challenge)

Since I can’t live a thousand years and my talents are severely limited, I will ask for your help. A gift, if you may call it.

Instead of posting a greeting on my social media wall (facebook, twitter, Google plus, Pinterest and what have you), IN ONE SENTENCE, POST ONE GOOD THING YOU DID (or planning to do) TODAY, June 11, my birthday. I don’t care if the good or kindness is big or small, or to whoever you did or plan to do it. Heck, it could even be your enemies, so long as you felt you did something good today.

It’s my birthday today, thank you for the kind greetings! I have a small request to make, a birthday wish I thought of just yesterday.

I don’t know when did this started but I’m beginning to believe my ultimate purpose in this world, is to make it a better, fun place for people to live, in whatever possible ways I could. Since I can’t live a thousand years and my talents are severely limited, I will ask for your help. A gift, if you may call it.

Instead of posting a greeting on my social media wall (Facebook, twitter, Google+, Pinterest and what have you), IN ONE SENTENCE, POST ONE GOOD THING YOU DID TODAY(or planning to do, today), June 11, my birthday.  I don’t care if the good or kindness is big or small, or to whoever you did or plan to do it. Heck, it could even be for your enemies, so long as you felt you did something good today.

Comment on this picture post challenge on Facebook. I will disable all other posting on my timeline. On twitter, tag me via @bonedoc or use the hashtag #ididgoodtoday. On Google+, tag me by adding a plus sign before my name, Remo Aguilar in your comment before this picture post. In the rest of social media platforms, just tag me.

Oh, don’t worry about boasting or being bullied for doing something good, in my wall. It’s my wall. A good deed deserve a space on my wall! 🙂

Go!! Here are my social media accounts!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bonedoc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bonedoc
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RemoAguilar

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