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Hello,
here we are finally at the second appointment with digital marketing strategy by S.Tou.W.
My professional relationship with digital marketing started in 2011, considering that I opened my Facebook account in 2009 I think it was quite interesting to reflect how to use this platform where so many people were already spending so much time. Using it and studying Facebook as a school subject made me change a lot how to use my profile. After this first experience at the Dyfi Biosphere Reserve,  and graduated in November 2011 I opened a blog called sustainabletourismworld.wordpress.com 🙂 and my path towards Social Media & Digital marketing expertise was started.

In the past I almost always had to work with no or very limited budget, but for great organisation, such as Dyfi Biosphere Reserve, North Devon’s Biosphere Reserve, The Long Run and Istituto OIkos Onlus. Working with those organisations has taught me so much.

I learnt there are 2 essentials rules in the social media management:

  1. Your objective is to create and manage a community and
  2. you always need to experiment.

Those are the basics for the Relationship Marketing, I mentioned in the previous post about digital marketing.

Is this easy? Can a strategy of relationship marketing be a short strategy? Absolutely not. Relationship is the only base of any strategy to community development. The only difference with a more important budget is the potential number of  people that can be engaged with your campaigns at the time, but this is not enough on it’s own to build a strong community.

Some one told me, when I was learning about social media strategy, that you need money and/ or time to develop a social media strategy, if you have the time, then  even with a limited budget you can succeed in engaging with people and creating a community; if you have money to spend in campaigns instead, you need to spend them wisely, or could just attract one time “like givers”.

It is also true that is not so easy to find the right formula, possibly because there is not only one formula. Depending from many factors, a campaign working perfectly on year 1 , could give you the worst results the year later, year 2 , in particular if external factors have changed for unpredictable circumstances. So a proper budget for social media strategy is helpful for experimenting different solutions in different time of the year.

If you are considering to open a  social media account, please consider long term strategy (let’s say 5 years) and a budget comfortable to experiment is recommend.

Do your best to keep using and update your account, otherwise we will see huge numbers of out of date profiles, some of them could be also hacked and full of unpleasant words or media.

Next time I will share about the importance of the PR in managing a social media platform and maybe how to create the community feeling with your fan..

Please remember that your feedback is always welcome 🙂

Relationship marketing & community by S.Tou.W.

Are you interested to know more?
Ask  #STouW by Sara Vitali about: 

#sustainabletourism consultancy,
#socialmedia strategies for tourism sector & linked sustainable, responsible, green or eco businesses;
#sustainabledevelopment through tourism.
http://sustainabletourismworld.com/sara-vitali-stw-founder/