How outdoor businesses can avoid the social media traps
Is social media a rabbit hole for outdoor businesses?
In the past eight years, Mark and I have spent over $150,000 on social media. I don’t mean courses or programmes as we probably spent another $50,000 on those, I mean, $150,000 in consultants, experts and boosting adverts. In this article, we want to share our learnings around social media.
As we look back at our ‘social media journey’ we could either cry, at the amount of money we have spent, or see these as school fees. These fees help us move quicker but also be able to share our lessons with outdoor business owners.
Social media is a key part of your business and something that you need to keep an eye on! It is also the flavour of the month with lots of companies out there trying to become your partner and take your money. We have been there and got the T-shirt!
You could have the opinion that social media is a fad or fashion that is going to change and morph over time. But, the key two questions every business owner needs to be able to answer is: -
- What do I want social media to do for me?
- What am I willing to do, consistently, to achieve this?
We paid a lot of school fees because we didn’t start off with absolute clarity over these questions. This then let so-called ‘professionals’ blind us with their promises.
We are now in a place where we’ve learned a lot about social media and placed it as a core function in our business.
The challenge facing outdoor businesses is which horse to ride. We see many other outdoor businesses trying to ride many horses at the same time. They have got Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Deezer, Snapchat and Twitter, all going at the same time.
You need to know who your customers are AND which platform or platforms they most enjoy and engage with the most.
Customers are not going to miraculously knock down your door — you have to engage with them on the most relevant platform with the most engaging content.
At best social media allows us to develop authority with customers. It enables us to build trust and also shows the range of opportunities to customers. Yet, you need to push people to see you. The chances of them finding you organically is slim!
We have gone from doing a Facebook Live every day, for a year, to now doing less content but boosting it and getting in front of our ideal customer. Even with over 55,000 followers on our page, the likelihood of them seeing our organic post is less than 0.5%!
Another challenge facing outdoor business owners is they are chasing the wrong metric. Likes! The belief is that the more likes you get, the better your post is doing. This is not the full story and is not the metric that we chase.
Why don’t we ‘like’ it? Excuse the pun! Well, liking is non-committal. It takes no effort from the viewer and doesn’t give our brand any benefit or support. It might make the owner feel good that they have lots of likes but it is not getting you any more customers! What you should be chasing is as many comments, page follows, and shares as possible. Why? Well, this shows that somebody values what you’ve put out there so much that they want to share it. They want all their friends on that platform to see it. Now that is a connection with a customer.
They have taken time to think about it, whether what they say is good or bad, it is irrelevant. Liking or subscribing is great because they get to see more of your stuff, but it’s not actually as valuable for you as you think it is.
Now we need to discuss spending money on social media!
A myth that you need to break is that by putting content out there you are going to get traction.
We know how much money we’ve spent. We’ve grown our Facebook page and our tribe through a little bit of organic, but a lot of paid adverts, lots of boosting of images, right stuff in front of the right people. So if you want to build a social media presence, get your chequebook out.
However, we have found a hack that has reduced our spend on social media.
What we have found that works well is getting involved in a community of like-minded people who are willing to go and play ‘comment tennis’. We put something up for our business, let the community know and the other 25 or 50 members in the community go and writes comments. According to later.com — 10 to 15 comments on Facebook is equal to $50 worth of boost. So if you think about that, it’s cheaper to go and get 10 to 15 comments than it is to go and pay $50.
We’re not we are not social media experts but have learnt a lot of lessons over the last few years and our aim is to pass on some of our learnings.
Social media is a way of developing trust in people that you are who you say you are. That you do what you say you do and you’re good at it. That you are a personality or person that your customers would quite like to hang out with. Use this to build your business and you are not going to go too far wrong!
We Get Outdoors is passionate about getting people into the outdoors and helping businesses give them an experience that keeps them coming back.
If you want to jump on a call with the We Get Outdoors co-founders and see how you can take your outdoor and adventure business to the next level then book a FREE consultation HERE
If you’d like to promote your outdoor business in front of around 80,000 outdoor enthusiasts, across 30 different podcast platforms and social media, then we would love to have you on our podcast — Outdoor Business Promo Series. Simply click HERE to book an interview slot.
