Bill Seaver with MicroExplosion.com, recently “pitched” a new concept: Social Media Batting Practice. Will You Play?
First up: How would a weekend fly fishing guide and instructor use social media to grow his business?
Here are 3 quick tips for this small business:
- ‘Fly Fishing Tips’ Blog
Creating an instructional blog is a great way to target specific customers. Don’t worry about revealing too much. You want to do just the opposite. This is a great opportunity to show your expertise in fly fishing.As an instructional blog, it has a clear focus. Many blogs are all over the place and have no consistency. Creating a clear, precise blog is a great way to target customers. Remember it’s not the quantity of visitors you want, it’s the quality. Five strong customers are better then 100 5-second visits.
- Start the conversation on Twitter
Start following friends, colleagues and competitors. Now of course, tweeting with friends will not expand the bank account. However, it does start the conversation. By discussing “fly fishing” the conversation expands beyond friends.After friends, begin following local lodging companies, restaurants, and local organizations. Don’t just follow. Join the conversation. Make friends. Make partnerships.
Twitter creates followers, it creates buzz, and it eventually creates customers. It all begins with one sentence: “What are you doing?”
- Flickr Photo Contest
Ask for photographs of favorite fly-fishing spots. Then, give away free instructions to the best entries.
After it’s over, be sure to give something to all entries. Even if it’s small, everyone loves winning.Flickr requires minimal time and investment. Plus, it has great photo sharing tools that allow you to integrate those photos into your blog and more importantly it allows “customers” to share those photos.
Other tips, outside of Social Media:
- Create packages with local lodging companies
- Place brochures in state border Welcome Centers
- Find ways to give away lessons. A small gesture will lead to great word of mouth
- Email is a great way to talk with customers. Look for ways to collect email addresses.
Tags: Social Media
April 24th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Great tips John! Thanks for playing social media BP.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Twitter? Really? Twitter is currently haunted by mostly SEO folks. I really wonder if you’d find folks there who care about fly fishing.
Instead, he should search meetup.com for fishing groups he could join, join one of the 352 fly fishing groups on Facebook, post his services/classes on his local craigslist, post a video of his fly fishing class on YouTube, and register in all the local search engines. And frankly, without joining other “fly fishing” photo groups on flickr, they might not find his contest anyway.
I would encourage a Local fly fishing instructer to register for free with local search (and some of my other suggestions) before “twittering”.
Without promotion and optimization of his blog, it also won’t be found amongst the millions of blog created every day, and he would be competing against http://troutunderground.com/ who (based on compete.com data) gets over 5,000 visitors/day. So, creating a new blog would not be the best use of his time - he’d be better off joining an established community of fly fishing enthusiasts.