One point that is extremely important for embarking into social media is that you know your audience. When you think about it, Social Media is really a subset of your entire marketing plan and I don’t think you would dream of beginning a marketing campaign without knowing your target market! The same goes for Social Media.
Where Does your Audience Hang out?
On June 26th, I gave a one and a half hour presentation at the NW Travel Writers Summer Seminar in Tacoma, Washington. While preparing for this presentation, it was interesting to note the different social media sites for travel such as http://www.exploroo.com/ and http://www.passportstamp.com/ where travelers hang out. These social media sites would be a great place to see what travelers are talking about and to discover upcoming trends.
Travel writers also need to know where the editors and publishers hang out. You need to be able to find the editorial calendars so you can pitch you articles. A couple of websites include www.woodenhorsepub.com and http://www.demandmedia.com/.
Wooden Horse Publishing is a subscription based service that compiles the editorial calendars of over 2,000 print publications in the US and Canada plus demographic information and more. I found out about this resource from a seasoned travel writing veteran Myrna Oakley who has written many books about the Pacific Northwest and has been published many times over.
Once you are approved, Demand Media helps freelancers by asking you to claim titles you want to write about by searching within categories or sites you are interested in. These titles are yours alone and you have seven days to submit the completed article. After review and fact checking by a copy editor, your article is approved for publishing and payment is processed. You can visit http://www.demandmedia.com/studios/writers/ to get approved as a freelancer.
Are you Relevant?
The point of sharing this information with you is first of all, I had to know my audience in order to share relevant social media ideas with this highly targeted group and secondly, when these travel writers embark on their social media journey, they need to understand their audience and who they want to attract!
So here are some questions to ask yourself to make sure you are focusing your social media plan on the appropriate audience:
- What is your niche?
- What does your niche need?
(Describe their needs NOT what you offer) - What are your reader’s pain points?
(What are their problems?) - What emotions are evoked by their big pain?
- What do you do? (How do you solve your reader’s problems?)
- Who are your competitors?
- What differentiates your writing, products or services from the competition?
The above information is from one of the slides of the presentation given at the NW Travel Writers Summer Seminar. If you would like to view the entire presentation, please go to my Slideshare account and feel free to download.
Spend some time thinking about this list of questions. Write the answers down and use this as a starting point for creating your plan and as Lisa Barone says in her blog post on Social Media Planning, “If you enter into Social Media without a plan, you will fail. PERIOD!
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