I ask myself this question a lot.

In order for a resort marketer to successfully market on social media, do they have to personally be active on social media?

I’m gonna play a little back and forth with myself, but I’d love to hear your thoughts at the end.

NO: One of the most important skills on social media is listening, and you can often listen without having an account.

YES: There is a culture within social media that needs to be understood and is hard to understand without using it yourself.

NO: Social media is communication between people. It’s a new medium, but communication is something you can master in one medium that often transfers to another.

YES: Each network has unique opportunities and paths to virality that are hard to notice without digging in yourself.

NO: Just watching from the sidelines can often be enough to pick out the reasons many things work better than others.

YES: Every social network seems to have a faux-pas or two. If you don’t know these, you could do more harm than good.

NO: Most faux-pas by brands are noticed and looked down upon by other marketers, not customers.

YES: Most social media coverage is overhyped and self-serving. Using it helps you get an accurate idea of what it can do.

NO: Even using it doesn’t seem to help people see through the hype and fringe cases that get the headlines.

YES: The power lies in getting lots of people posting about what you want them to post about. Using social media helps you personally identify with and relate to the motives that get people to post.

NO: Much of the motivation carries over to other areas of live. Understand those and you’ll understand much of social media.

There’s a culture within marketing that looks down upon anyone in business that doesn’t actively use social media. My gut reaction is that’s bogus but looking back I can see a lot of value from experimenting with the sites myself and being on the “front lines” as I say.

What do you think? Can a marketer take advantage of social media for their resort brand if they aren’t consistently posting and watching a handful of streams?

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.