Social media and the modern-day park
Image courtesy Blackpool Pleasure Beach
The online world has dramatically changed the way we live our lives and how companies target audiences and new business. Here,Beth Whittaker assesses the importance of social media in the role of a modern-day amusement park’s marketing strategy
BACK in 2001 it was all about Friends Reunited - create a personal account, log in and have a nosey at how successful your old school pals now were having entered into adult life. A few years later in 2003, Myspace came on the scene and it was the place to be if you were an up and coming band desperately trying to get noticed… Then came Facebook in 2004, quickly followed by twitter two years later, both of which have taken the world by storm. Since these early days of social media, it is fair to say that almost every platform for interacting in an online ‘social’ capacity has been launched. Social media has become so integrated into every
day life that it is difficult to remember a time when we weren’t following celebrities and their ‘insightful’ tweets; or putting an Instagram filter on that much-needed glass of wine at the end of the week; or associating a #hashtag with everything and anything in sight, all while watching a cat play the piano on YouTube. Then of course, there’s your Pinterest board - full of website clippings to come back to and peruse at a later date should you find a spare five
38 InterPark January–February 2015
minutes before checking your email or Linkedin account for career networking updates! Social media platforms have massively changed the way
in which we live our lives; the way we communicate, source information and keep up to date with our social interests. The huge surge in social media has, in turn, changed the way businesses promote themselves and interact with their clientele - opening up a world of new marketing possibilities and interaction with their existing and potential customers. To underestimate social media’s importance in the modern world would be naive. Today,
it is just as likely that a business will have
Facebook and twitter accounts as it will a website and amusement and theme parks - with many of their core target group having grown up with social media around them their entire lives - are no exception. The leading parks around the world draw millions of Facebook likes and twitter followers between them - take Six Flags in the US, at the time of print its Facebook page had just under 5.5 million likes, while its twitter page attracts just under
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