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...
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 MoreI've been reading a lot lately about social media and about summer camps in an effort to always be up to date on various ideas. I wanted to quickly share some books and blogs I've been reading for your enjoyment. Books: How Children Succeed by Paul Tough: This book was recommended to me by one of my camp partners as a great way to learn more about child development at summer camp. It goes in depth on developing non-cognitive skills. So far a...
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...
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