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Scrolling the Shore
Lambton County is a small and mighty community. Home to some of the most beautiful waterfronts in Ontario, biking and hiking trails, craft breweries, and expanding agriculture. There’s no reason to keep this great county a secret!
Summer of 23’ and 24’ I worked with Tourism Sarnia Lambton (Ontario’s Blue Coast) as a Tourism Industry Consultant. Here, I created content static and video content for all their social platforms, monitored engagement rates, managed brand awareness and consistency, and built a core community of followers. Additionally, my team and I represented Tourism Sarnia Lambton at local events and built strong relationships with our small business owners and community members.
Before the summer had started, I conducted a social analysis of their Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. From my social listening, I could see there was a clear disconnect in their posting strategies. It was clear that followers were seen as users, not as community members. This was a problem. We needed to create engaging and inviting content for our community and visitors. This was the foundation for my posting strategy.
At Tourism Sarnia Lambton, we understand our brand's perfect platform is Instagram. Due to its visual and social nature, we can share artistic photographs and engaging content. Our mission was to inform the public of events and important travel information through static content, share travel stories through reels, and use stories to engage with our audience. From an average of 15 likes per post on Instagram, that summer we drove our average likes per post up 58%.
ReelsDiscover like an astronaut
No place in the world loves our local hero more than Lambton County. As a born and raised Sarnian’ Chris Hadfield has always been a strong pillar of connection in our community. Our team coordinated with Hadfield’s team over the summer to set up an intimate meeting where our team could grab some content for our socials at no cost. This was an extremely important moment for our group and boosted tremendous traffic with 5.1k impressions. This post affirmed our new posting strategy as we were able to grab our local audience and tourists who bond over philanthropic and social micro-celebrities while highlighting travel tips.
Pizza Party!
The Petrolia Pizzafest is a niche community event for the Petrolia and surrounding Wyoming area. This festival is small but mighty, bringing in families and patrons over the great joy of pizza. Since our team knew this event wouldn’t draw much attention outside of city dwellers we used this as an opportunity for organic content. Following Dave Portnoy’s famous pizza reviews, I’d thought this would be the perfect opportunity to capitalize off this creative inspiration. We we’re able get our video to reach 19.8% of viewers as non-followers and gain a few new fans from this demographic!
Static & Carousels
We noticed we received the most local engagement on our Facebook accounts. Here, we had good consistency of likes, shares, and comments on posts compared to all other platforms. On Facebook, we typically post static content as we noticed it received the most shares amongst our followers. On average, we would receive 17 likes per post and 11 shares, this means a near 54% of our users who engaged with our post shared it to their network.
Static
As simple as the post, the greater the engagement. This carousel was created to promote a small food truck festival within the area. I gathered images from the participating vendors and created this short carousel to put on our socials. This simple but mighty post received the most engagement we had seen all summer from static content. We saw 197 likes and loves, 49 comments, and 175 shares! Followers shared this to their pages, sharing their excitement for the event, and it was posted to local community groups, including “Public Knowledge SARNIA LAMBTON” , “All About Sarnia” and we saw some local businesses repost it to their feed!
Captain Kidd Day is a fun annual family event hosted by Corunna’s community leaders. From big to small they have fun active and social events that keep the whole family happy. To help inform other community members, I created this static post highlighting the daily activities. We received high amounts of engagement on this post, resulting in 82 likes and 110 shares!
TikTok
In order to connect with the youth and millennials of Lambton County, we started sharing on TikTok. We began using TikTok solely to build familiarity for our brand. Thankfully, TSL gave us creative liberty to post. This allowed our team of funny Gen Z’s to feel inspired and craft posts we knew would interest and build our audience. After carefully selecting trends and audios, we participated in trends while still maintaining brand voice and professionalism. Over the course of the summer, we grew our following 138.3%, our view count 26.6%, and our engagement 18.4%
TikTokGiddy Up to the Rodeo
One thing about us summer students is we LOVE Taylor Swift, so when the videos of fans attending different events and sharing with their friends what song they were most excited to see her perform began trending, we immediately hopped on the bandwagon with arguably the best event in Lambton County. My co-worker and I had so much fun creating this video in the stands and talking with other attendees about the work we did for TSL. This small idea quickly turned into a conversation starter and opened up doors for us to get some behind-the-scenes clips of the rodeo and event organizers. This video reached 3,576 views, 118 likes, 7 shares and 7 saves.
We have the best beaches in Ontario
Duh!
Our county is home to over 300 kilometres of waterfront, including 2 blue flag beaches. The blue flag status is an international standard for water quality, cleanliness, environmental standards and security. In order to promote this amazing feature, I decided to incorporate the idea into a trending audio. Our take on the ‘Common Sense I Fear’ trend was to have us two summer students chatting about our great beaches! This TikTok reached 17.1 k views, 115 likes, 11 saves and 4 shares.