Early on the morning of October 31, 2013, something happened that I never expected to see. It’s nothing earthshattering, but extremely surprising nonetheless.

Powder Magazine passed Freeskier for Facebook likes.

No big deal right? Well, right. How they got there and how far behind they were is what we need to glance back over so we don’t miss the lesson.

Throwdown
The Ski Town Throwdown is one of the more clever social media campaigns skiing has seen. When you distill the game plan down to the questions that might have lead to their approach, it becomes eye opening to say the least:

1. “What group of businesses has fans that we want to reach?” (ski resorts)
2. “What honor can we create that will make these businesses compete against each other to win?” (best ski town)
3. “What mechanism can we use that will require their fans to vote in order for a resort to claim that honor?” (facebook app)
4. “What can we do to make sure each voter has to ‘like’ our page before they vote?” (offerpop tug of war)

In other words, Powder Magazine gave you a reason to share your fans with them. The goal of the Throwdown was not to name a winner. The goal was to bolster Powder’s fan count.

Macro
Let’s back up again. On the grand scheme of things, the fact that Powder has more fans than Freeskier means virtually nothing. It’s a stat, albeit a very public one, but little more. The rank between the two isn’t important.

But the effects of those fans are important. Every post gets more reach. Every link gets more clicks. Every video gets more views.

And how much more? Before they started the original Throwdown in 2012, they had fewer than 38,000 fans (if I remember right, Freeskier had about 90k at that point). Today, just a shade over a year later, they have 155,000. Think about that, in one year, they’ve more than quadrupled their fan count.

Micro
Again, consider the effects of having triple the clicks, triple the views, triple the shares, triple the reach on every post. And they achieved this by asking four, simple questions:

1. “What group of businesses has fans that we want to reach?”
2. “What honor can we create that will make these businesses compete against each other to win?”
3. “What mechanism can we use that will require their fans to vote in order for a resort to claim that honor?”
4. “What can we do to make sure each voter has to ‘like’ our page first?”

It’s a simple as that.

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.