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Personal branding for summer camp directors

Posted on August 26, 2013
in Social Strategies
by Nick Middleton
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Each person has their own individual brand that represents how they portray themselves to the world. For a camp director or assistant director, this personal brand can go very far in helping establish their credibility to new and returning parents. Not all directors are going to want to promote their brand (I'll cover marketing your personal brand in my next blog post), but it still is important to actively cultivate your personal brand. The first step for defining your personal...

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Make your Facebook posts engaging: Content

Posted on August 16, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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This is the last post in a series of posts around how to make your Facebook posts more engaging. I have already covered imagery and post type, but today I want to focus more on content. I specifically want to cover the following three questions: What should your posts say? What links should you drive to? Which videos/photos should you promote? It can be tempting to post anything and everything to your summer camp's Facebook page. But you should definitely be selective and only...

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Make your Facebook posts engaging: Post type

Posted on August 14, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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The next entry in this series on how to make your Facebook posts more engaging revolves around post type. According to SocialBakers, who looked at over 5,000 Facebook posts in the past year, the most engaging posts on Facebook include photos. However, depending on the kind of content you create, other types of posts can be equally engaging for your summer camp: Photo: As mentioned above, this is the most engaging type of post. Camps have amazing imagery and photo collections, so use...

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Make your Facebook posts engaging: Images

Posted on August 12, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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Today, I am starting a short series on how to make your Facebook posts more engaging. The first part of the series is going to cover imagery. Luckily, summer camps have great images from their summer photographers, which means they always have an arsenal of photos to use for Facebook posts. Still, I see camps all of the time using images that don't perform well on Facebook. Here are five quick tips to make your Facebook images more engaging: 1. Pictures...

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Social media planning sessions

Posted on August 9, 2013
in Social Strategies
by Nick Middleton
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With the summer season winding down, it is time for your camp to hold an annual social media planning session. Here is an example of an agenda for this type of meeting: 1. Complete an audit of current social media activity, tools, and analytics 2. Decide if you are going to hire a social media consultant. Does your program need help? Or are you in a good place with the current staff? 3. Brainstorm your main marketing objectives for next year 4. Set a...

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Social Media Roundup for Summer Camps- August 1st

Posted on August 2, 2013
in Social Media Roundup
by Nick Middleton
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Here are some interesting articles on social media and summer camps from this past week! CNN: Facebook enables embedded posts- This will allow you to embed Facebook posts directly on your webpage. This will be very cool for summer camps where parents and children share their favorite camp memories on your Facebook page. You can now have those embedded on your webpage. Mashable: 50 digital media resources you may have missed- There are a lot of interesting resources and articles about social...

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Setting a Camper Growth Goal

Posted on August 1, 2013
in Social Strategies
by Nick Middleton
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Before starting any social media program, it is important to build out your marketing objectives and understand the main goal your camp is trying to reach. Most camps I work with are looking to grow their number of campers, but have never set an actual goal around what that looks like. I often encourage my camps to build a chart to map out exactly what 25%, 50% and 75% growth looks like. For small camps it can be a very...

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My Night at Camp Champions

Posted on July 30, 2013
in Camp Inspiration
by Nick Middleton
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Last week I had the extreme pleasure of spending the night at Camp Champions, a traditional overnight camp located on Lake LBJ in the Texas hill country. Given that I am a life-long lover of camp, I was really looking forward to being back out at camp. Here are a few things I learned while I was there. Attitude is everything: There are a few words I can think of to describe the energy and attitude at Camp Champions: encouraging, loving, grateful....

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Facebook insights for your Facebook page

Posted on July 23, 2013
in Social Tools
by Nick Middleton
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Almost every summer camp has a Facebook page and it is extremely important to take advantage of the insights that Facebook provides you to grow and optimize your page. I am going to quickly walk you through my page's insights so you can see what metrics are important to track. On the main page of Facebook insights there are three panels available: page likes, post reach and engagement. The most important of these three to take a deeper look at is post...

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