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....
Read MoreAlmost 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...
Read MoreWatch this video to learn more about how to set up Facebook ads for your summer camp. Email blake@socialsummercamp.com with any questions! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhPxqDUImQ&feature=youtu.be...
Read MoreDuring camp it is absolutely imperative for camps to keep their parents and community updated, but it can certainly become a daunting task when you have to update your internal camp software (campminder, bunk1, etc.), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the list goes on. I've posted before about how to best create content during camp, but I wanted to share a few additional tips on how much you should be updating your social entities. 1. Update twice a day, collect content...
Read MoreWatch this video to learn more about how-to set up Twitter ads for your summer camp. Email blake@socialsummercamp.com with any questions! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekOvwQSUAw&feature=youtu.be...
Read MoreA couple of days ago I wrote about how camps can use crowd funding platforms to raise money. Today I am going to go over a couple of ways that camps should promote these crowd funding efforts. 1. Social media platforms: This seems obvious, but you should heavily promote your project on your own social media platforms. Use photos of camp activities and messaging that clearly describes why you are asking for money and allows your community to connect with your cause. 2....
Read MoreA few months ago Twitter came out with a great study on the top-performing tweets from the past year. They analyzed over 20,000 promoted tweets to understand what drove the most action among their advertisers. Summer camps can take some cues about what to tweet from their analysis. Here are the four calls to action they found performed the best: #1 Ask for a download: If your camp has a mobile app, this is a great call to action for your tweets....
Read MoreWatch this video to learn more about Facebook ad targeting for summer camps. Email blake@socialsummercamp.com with any questions! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgRJ-hS4SmM...
Read MoreGoogle offers summer camps some great tools for learning more about what prospective parents are searching for. One tool, Google Trends, allows you to see what search terms are being searched for at certain times of the year. The image below shows last year's trend for searches using the following terms: summer camp texas (red), summer camp maine (blue) and summer camp new york (yellow). Understanding Google Search Insights could help you boost your website's traffic. The trend lines show what...
Read MoreSocial media marketing for summer camps is a full-time job! In fact, when I built out the chart below to estimate how many hours per month a camp should spend on social media, I was stunned to see my estimations top out somewhere around 55 hours per month! This is why hiring a consultant to do social media is so important. In general, the services of Social Summer Camp can take the time spent down to around 15 hours per...
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