Marketing buzzwords have never been my strong suit. I’ve had to look up acronyms on the sly in the middle of a skype call (thankfully, my dogs have decided there will be no more video phone calls in this house.) As I got involved in outdoor recreation social media, I heard a lot about “evergreen” content. It has nothing to do with conifers! Evergreen marketing or evergreen content is meant to outlast trends and be timeless. Does it have any place in social media, which is all about capturing the now?
Sure, you can produce sunny paddling videos that will catch eyes every summer, or foliage photos that speak to leaf peepers every fall, but social media is all about the here and now. Let’s call it time and place marketing (is that an official thing? Perhaps I could find out if marketing blogs weren’t rendered unreadable by f’n popups.) The importance of thinking about time and place when posting on social media is clearly exemplified by the standout success of big dumps of snow.
A few months into my job playing Northern Outdoors on Facebook, I prepared what I thought was a filler post — a photo sent over from the office of a few people shoveling the lodge’s roof. In those days you could schedule Facebook posts. I set it for a 4pm publishing and headed out to Rolling Fatties via snowmobile with Mark. When we arrived at Fatties after plowing through ungroomed trails (and capturing great snowy videos,) I found a “holy shit” email from Northern Outdoors’ President Russell Walters (Russell does not actually swear.) The likes, comments and shares on the pile of snow photo outpaced anything I’d posted all winter.
Recently, back at Fatties, aka my new “office,” proprietress Polly Mac and I were talking Instagram Insights (how lucky am I to have so many entrepreneurial friends who like to geek out on web data?!) I asked her to show me her posts with the highest reach of all time. Take a wild guess what they were… piles of snow!
So what to conclude about the love of big dumps? Well, we are in the heart of Maine’s winter outdoor recreation playgrounds, where visitors come to ski Sugarloaf, snowmobile up Coburn Mountain, snowshoe to Poplar Falls, fat bike the single track off the Narrow Gauge. Everyone who likes to play outside in the winter anxiously awaits snow forecasts and trail reports. When weatherman Keith Carson says bombogenesis is about to explode, the social media crowd goes wild. The winter traffic to webcams on NorthernOutdoors.com and Sugarloaf.com is as congested as the road to Old Orchard Beach in the summer.
Like everything else you’re putting out there, know your audience, know what they want to see, and show it to them. If the snow gods don’t bless you with a big dump, there’s always beer.
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