I typically ride my bike to the office every day, but lately I’ve had to make a goal of 3 days a week as temperatures have already been below 0° F this month. Driving, however, has it’s perks. A few quiet minutes in the car each day allows me to once again do something I did last winter: talk to myself.

Lest you think I’m a complete nut (I am, but that’s beside the point), these solo conversations are practice. Yes, I’m talkin’ ’bout practice, man.

I do a lot of writing. I’m (hopefully) getting better at expressing myself with the written word. However, responding to spontaneous questions verbally is something I simply haven’t had to do much lately. So, on my drives home, I’ll ask myself questions. I’ll take the first 3/4 of the drive to answer it, then I’ll try to answer it again, covering all the same points, in 1/3 the words before I get home.

The Hairy Question
Last week, I asked myself this question as I got in the car:

“What is social media good at when it comes to resort marketing?”

There are a million ways to answer that question. Some people say “wasting time”, some people would say “everything”, but let me share what my answer was.

“Social media is really good at quickly, easily, and affordably pushing out indirect marketing content where it’s not important for you to know who sees it and who doesn’t.”

Let’s look a little closer at that.

Measuring
Social media, by it’s nature, typically requires a one-size-fits-all approach to content. Every Social7 email that is sent each week is 100% unique to the person who receives it. If I know exactly who you are and know exactly what you want, I can send a personalized message directly to you.

No so with social. By nature and necessity, social media posts are forced to be generic.

What We Do Know, What We Don’t
Now, we do know a few things about who might see these messages. Using Facebook insights you probably know their general age range, ratio of men to women, general locations, etc. For example, I can know that if I post about an event in Chicago, that post may be relevant to 2,100 people, most of whom are 25-35.

But that leads us back to what we don’t know. We don’t know how many of them actually see it. Email delivery and click rates are almost perfect. The one exception is open rates. Because images are used to track if an email is opened, reported open rates are typically lower than actual open rates. The result is a small number of people who you can’t match to an action in email.

The inverse tells the story for social media. That’s just the way it is. Will it change? Maybe, maybe not.

Remember What You’re Saying
As long as things remain as is, you have to remember what you are doing every time to post something on social media.

Essentially, you are saying that three parts of your campaigns are not mission critical:

1. Knowing who sees the message
2. Delivering unique content to different types of people
3. Knowing what they do after they see it

That’s the gist. Social is great at a lot of things, but it does come with some trade-offs compared to other channels.

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.