Alberta Business Marketing

You do have a choice when it comes to social media.  You can embrace the challenge and jump in the social media pool, or leave it entirely up to guests of your tourism business or region to tell your story. This post tackles the five skills you need to look for in choosing your teams social media stars and understand how your social media team should spend their time, as they wade into the social media waters to increase recognition of your business, boost inquiries and sales.

What is Media? There will only ever will be four kinds. Text, photos, audio, video.

What is Social? It’s how people share media

Enable social media success by fostering a culture that recognizes the inputs needed for social media success:

• a champion
• trust in team members
• time
• bold ideas
• bridge people
• diversity
• tools and training
• measures of success
• a clear social media policy

Then, recruit and foster these five key skill sets in your team:

• Listening – Knowing where and how to find stuff, and to enable response in near real time to guest messages across a range of Websites.
• Literacy – editorial, writing, editing to a standard and style that reflects your brand, along with depth of knowledge of your products and services.
• Micro-messaging – get good at being efficient with your words.  Less is More.  Twitter: 140 characters.  Google Ads – 125 characters.
• Media production (audio and video / photography) –  producing, recording and editing media and distributing it in ways that promote social interaction.
• Conversation hosting –  mingle with your fans and encourage conversation.