Social Media Groups with Great Info, trip planning and decorating

Lisa RichartHernandez
Hi, welcome back to RView podcast. Today we’re going to talk about all kinds of social media groups. Are they helpful? Or are they hateful? That’s a question for you to decide. But we’ll tell you about where we get our information and some of the groups that were a part of that help us plan our trips and adventures. So get your papers and pencils ready, or login to your social media accounts because we have lots of information to share with you today.

intro
Welcome to RView with your hosts George and Lisa Hernandez. Each week listen in as George and Lisa talk about their RV and travel adventures all around the world. George and Lisa travel in their 40 foot Class A trip and motor coach and tow their Jeep Wrangler, always looking for fun and adventure.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Hi, welcome back to RView podcast. I’m Lisa Richart Hernandez.

George
And I’m George Hernandez.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And today we have a great show for you. We are going to talk a little bit about social media and our Facebook groups. And are they helpful or hateful. And what kind of brought this up is George and I spend a lot of time on our social media when we’re doing planning things. And we love it as a way to connect with people from all over the world and keep in touch with our friends that we meet across the country. However, there’s also a lot of negative things to social media right now that have kind of made us shy away a little bit, especially me. I personally, you know, being a real estate agent, social media is my way to connect with a lot of people I’ve you know, almost 5000 friends on my on my personal Facebook page. And I just, I can’t help but read and see all the comments and get wrapped up in all the negative and negativity that’s going on. And honestly some of the hateful things that people are saying back and forth to each other. So I’ve tried to really sort of focus on things that are important to me, which one of those is our RV travel. And those are things that bring me joy. And then other things that bring me joy are learning about different things about camping and planning trips, and just learning in general and seeing other people enjoying themselves and giving me inspiration. So

George
I think, we’ve actually, I know personally, I enjoy planning the trip and looking at all these different places and all the websites that you can go to to get practically any kind of information regarding a campsite, a state location or route, you can find anything you want. And it’s it’s almost like a, like a puzzle, putting the puzzle together to plan the perfect trip.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that’s where I started to find the groups that I felt were the most helpful to me. And we’re gonna put all this information in our show notes. But I’m going to tell you right now, if you’re listening, and you’re not driving, just take out your phone, your social media, log into your Facebook account, because these are going to be some groups that you’re really just going to benefit from if you haven’t already joined them. The very first one I’d like to talk about is, well, last year, when we were planning our cross country RV trip, it was our first time planning a trip. And in all the groups that I see, I always see people asking for questions. Oh my gosh, smart. First time planning. This is you know, we’re going to do this and then people will, you know, come back and say oh my gosh, you’ve got way too much scheduled. Or you should consider shopping in these different places. And some give great advice. And some are just complete jerks, but you know, you got to weed those people out. But generally speaking, it’s a great source to find things. And so I started out with RV trip wizard, which I think we’ve talked about in one of our previous podcast when we were planning as a tool to help us find like it will help you plan how far you want to drive that day. It shows you all the campgrounds that are within that say circle radius of your drive. And so I would look up those campgrounds and RV trip wizard has some reviews. But then I would take it and go to this group called where’d you say RV? It’s w h e ra apostrophe d u stay RV. And there’s about 27,000 members in the group. And the moderator does an excellent job and like to just give give them kudos here. It’s dedicated to where did you stay and not a bunch of other judgmental garbage on there or it doesn’t, you know, get political or anything. And also like that it’s for everyone. It’s not just for, you know, a $500,000 class a luxury resort. It’s for everyone. And we don’t you know, some people think that $50 a night is expensive and some people think that $50 a night isn’t expensive and so they don’t like hate on each other in there and I really liked that because I did start out looking came for some different groups and people would be like, Oh my god, that place is so expensive. Oh, it’s just a ripoff. And then I’m like, Oh, I think it’s beautiful. So

George
There’s a price and a budget for everybody. Yeah, keep that in mind. And they don’t isolate,

Lisa RichartHernandez
Right. It’s all of that as a matter of opinion. And, you know, I use, one of my favorite things that he’s always say is people be like, Oh, my gosh, he makes so much money, or they’re loaded, or he makes a ton of money. And I said, Well, what is a ton of money, and I’ve gotten answers for anywhere from $50,000 a year is a ton of money to, you know, $50 million a year is a ton of money. So

George
It’s all perspective

Lisa RichartHernandez
All about perspective. And so you just have to really take the judgmental crap out of it, and go with the information that’s there. So they, I loved that group, that site, what I would do is I would go on RV trip wizard, I’d find a couple of campgrounds that looked like they were in the proper driving area. And then I would cross reference it with a where’d you say RV group, I had like three computers out of one looking at the extra reviews and pictures. And then it was great, because, you know, someone would say, Oh, I had a, you know, a 45 foot coach, and it was really tight getting in there and or the people were really friendly, or check out this great restaurant that’s near here. And it was really helpful in planning that trip. So that’s one of my favorite go to places. It’s called where’d you say RV group, and it’s on Facebook

George
And all Ttis is to tell you, when you’re planning a trip, plan your trip, this is for us, we did a 45 day adventure. And we wanted to make sure that we maximize every day, everything that we did, we definitely knew we wanted some down days and some relaxed days. And even for that it sounds simple. We want to relax but we wanted to relax somewhere with either scenery or some something beautiful that that we could enjoy not to be sitting in a in a RV. campground somewhere in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do for us a relaxed day is just either get out and go have a nice dinner or go see the town see what they have to offer. And all these websites are wonderful with that they’ll tell you, I mean, you can find out everything you can plan every single detail of your trip. Do you want to do that? No, you want to you want to have some freedom in your trip. That was one of the things that we were first told when we were talking to our friends who have been arguing for a while. regarding our 45 day trip, they said don’t over plan. And I totally agree with that. Because then then you’re on a damn schedule. And it takes the fun out of it.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I would definitely say our biggest rookie mistake was not spending enough time in each location. But we did kind of get to see just sort of like if you don’t have a whole year to do.

George
We had a couple things going on. We had our son and his girlfriend with us and they only had two weeks. So we kind of wanted to show them as much as possible. It was like a world when tour of all the parks and everything we could see in the United States just for them for the first two weeks. And then I think we kind of slowed down after that. And we spent a little more time and different places. And I enjoyed that part of it. next trip that we do cross country. The good thing is we’ve seen all these places there’s there’s no rush to get back to go do the mall, I would probably just pick a destination and maybe a couple stops in between. But now it’s more of here’s where we want to go. We want to spend some time, for example, Moab, Utah, we know we want to go back to Moab for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, whatever amount of time we want to go. But now we don’t have to go to all the other attractions. From here to there. Moab is the attraction.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Right. right. So let’s talk about your favorite social media group I would have to say that you pretty much I don’t know you’re on there every day. The Tiffin owners website or group there’s actually 21,000 Tiffin owners on that site.

George
Okay, and I’ll say this, every manufacturer, every model has their own group so find your group whatever you have. And I’ll tell you what, I love it, it’s on my Facebook so it just pops up and I love reading all the comments I love the reason I love it is because I’m they post a lot of problems. Not that tiffin has a lot of problems with

Lisa RichartHernandez
single every single RV right I have problems

George
something but it’s funny

Lisa RichartHernandez
or it’s a little thing or a big thing

George
But but the funny thing to me is it’s also a lot of people that are new to the RV world or new to tiffin. So one of my funniest things and it pops up all the time is that there’s a red button on the dash and every Buddy asked, What is this switch for? It’s like this read completely unlabeled switch the tiffin. Yes. And all it is is for the the your rear view mirrors on the outside into the fogger for the mirror, but it looks like this eject button. So everybody’s like, What is this thing? That’s, of course, you know, I love and now my thing is, you know, everybody has fun with it. And of course, the very first person’s like, it’s the fogger for the windows, but then it goes crazy from there. It’s like, you know, people post, don’t press it, whatever you do, don’t press that button. So and So going back to my initial comment, it’s a wonderful resource. If you have any problem, you just post your problem and you will get 100 different comments on how to fix it, or where to fix it. Or just anything you post it, you’ll have an answer in minutes.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, as a matter of fact, we have had, we’ve been had problems before and it was like early in the morning or after the tiffin service center was closed, which by the way is just as an aside, if you do have a tiffin or are thinking about buying a coach and you have anything wrong, I can’t speak any more highly about their service department.

George
No, I love their service department. I

Lisa RichartHernandez
mean, you get a guy on the phone and they step by step walk you through. I said I was like George could be a mechanic for Devon by now because they’d like have walked him through like so many different things. And not that we’ve had a whole bunch of problems. Don’t don’t take that in that way. But just there’s always little things that that you need help with one time we didn’t have our slides wouldn’t go back in and, and they walked him through the whole entire thing and got us back on the road.

George
We were We were stuck in Key West. Yeah, that sucks being stuck in Key West. But we were ready to check out and my slide. My slide wouldn’t go back in. And I was starting to panic. And I just said Well, let me call tiffin and see if they can help me. Well, not only that, they helped me learn how to bypass the hydraulic system. But they told me what part was wrong found out where we were going next overnighted the part to the destination that we were going to and the service tech that I was on the phone with said as soon as you have that part in your hand, you call me call me direct. And I’ll walk you through installing it. We installed it. Everything works great. And I mean, where else are you going to get that kind of service? It was unbelievable. And I cannot give tiffin enough kudos for that.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. The, I guess part of what we brought about this help for rightful of Facebook was a guy, Georgia. Tell me about that posted. Someone said something about the tires whether or not you should

George
Oh my God,

Lisa RichartHernandez
I felt sorry for the guy. He was like, What was it? You

George
So the comment was, I’ve heard that if you park on concrete for an extended period of time, it could be bad for your tires. So that was the question or the comment. So all these comments started coming in. And one guy said yes, be careful because if he parked on concrete, it could suck the oil out of the tires. Talk about a landslide of I felt so bad for this guy, because I’m not sure if that’s what he meant to type or if that’s something that he truly heard or believed. But the comments were hysterical. And it was it just went on and on and on like your blinker fluid. blinker fluid. It’s got a bucket of that’ll help. It’s just you know, and obviously, you got to weed through some of these comments and it was just funny. But in in all of that was the actual truth. And tires are like the biggest controversy of RV world. If you want to start the funniest thread, just ask something about tires, you will get 500 different views 500 different comments down to how much air pressure you should have. If you read all the comments on air pressure, you would be so confused because you’ll get like a 20 pound difference in from everybody. One guy will say 101 guy will say at it’s just it’s it’s I don’t know, it’s hysterical to me. That’s why I spend so much time on there. But in the end at the end of the day, it is absolutely very helpful and you will get your answer along with some comedic

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. And that’s again where it can be a little bit hateful because people do get their feelings hurt when people start bashing them if they have a silly question or silly answer. There really are other silly questions. It’s about how you pose the quarter

George
They’re silly but they’re not bashing like in a in a hateful way they’re just they’re just ribbing the person who rightly deserves it most of the time because the comments are like come I

Lisa RichartHernandez
guess that’s like a man thing

George
maybe it is

Lisa RichartHernandez
because I don’t really go on that site Alright, so let me talk about another one of so if that if you’re not a tiffin owner obviously just look up your whatever your I know they have a great Integra group and other

George
Every manufacturer every model

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, yeah. So we I also saw I said we I really like where do you say RV group, but I also found one that I find helpful because we have a larger Coach 40 foot and we tow. And so we like to when we’re traveling stay at nicer places and so they’re they created a group for just upscale RV resorts. There’s about 9000 members in there. It’s called upscale RV resorts, as the Facebook group, it’s really nice. It’s mostly targeted towards Big Rig friendly people. Again, it’s all relative, what’s an upscale RV Resort, they try to say they need to have amenities and, and nice, nice features. And they even have a spreadsheet of all the resorts that you can download, and they’ll email you it’s really helpful information. That’s another one that I really really liked. If you’re just sort of a general RV person and just like to have all kinds of stuff, there’s another site called RV chatter, and it has about 35,000 members and you get pretty much everything in there from you know, I just redid my coach or I’m looking for a place to stay or pretty much everything is the sister site RV parks and campground reviews. So one of the other planning groups that I found is called upscale RV resorts. And it’s it’s more for like class A’s larger RV supersedes and large fifth wheels. The term resorts for this group purposes means that they should have full hookups 50 amp power paved roads, you know pools, clubhouse, tennis quality

George
All amenities,

Lisa RichartHernandez
all nice amenities. Yeah, so it’s, it’s a resort. And again, resort is a relative term. And that was like a little bit of a back and forth over whether or not you

George
are but I think a lot of RV parks are starting to classify themselves as RV resorts because they realize that people are looking for resorts correct. And so do your homework because not everywhere is a resort. And again, it’s all in the eye of the beholder. But this group, it caters toward big rigs. A they’re harder to get into some of these parks. They need more room, they need more hookups, it’s it just caters to a bigger RV. Not necessarily. Oh, Super Deluxe. You know, they have beautiful Super Deluxe resorts. But I think they cater more toward the actual rig itself. Correct. To an extent.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Well, yeah, I mean, there’s there’s one for large, large RVs are camping too, but I think upscale is still trying to make the impression that it’s more upscale, taking away those basic resorts that you know, so that’s why they gave sort of a description of like, paved roads. True resorts, yes. Okay. Yeah. And then they want you know, it says like, for example, the moderator says, Please include in your posts relevant information such as location, amenities, rates, a brief review good or bad pictures, a web link would be greatly appreciated. And although a lot of parks can accommodate larger RVs it’s not our intention to include these if their primary customer base consists of smaller campers. Since there are other Facebook groups that are dedicated to all types of campers. Please limit post comments and questions to be about upscale RV parks in order to not dilute the effectiveness of the group. We appreciate your patience. And they’ve even gone so far as to make an app that you can download. That’s awesome. So it says the new release the upscale RV resorts is now available in both Apple and Google app stores. The Apple version has the minor interface improvements. But you can find it by going to the Apple store or in search for upscale RV resorts and you can download that. So it helps you know find that information. So I thought that was really helpful but also group Yep. If you do enough research, you can find what ever it is that you’re looking for. We’re just trying to help you get some helpful websites. Yeah, because there’s so many and like you can get lost right? Big time. Yeah, so let’s just say like, you know, I’m also a group, a member of camping is our life group. And there’s 133,000 members of the group, camping is our life group. And that literally has everything like from, what kind of cookware do you use? What kind of tents to use? Where do you stay here? What do you like about this, it’s just really super broad. So you can be a member of that group and kind of get a little bit of everything. I found that targeting more specifically what we’re looking for, for example, the upscale RV resorts, the tiffin site, the where’d you say, they were very, very targeted, the moderators do a great job of keeping them on point. So that’s like your point of reference, when you’re planning that thing. If you just want to like

George
general knowledge,

Lisa RichartHernandez
General knowledge and just like have you know things about camping in your feed that just is interesting to you, then I you know, go with camping, you know, join camping as is, is our life. Really, you can be a member of all the groups that you want to be a member of. Also, not only that, but I also follow them on me we, which is another social media group, aside from Facebook, I kind of started to get away from Facebook a little bit because of their censorship, they don’t really censor much in the RV world, because we’re not usually talking about things that are political or have anything to do with COVID. So I don’t think they really censor us too much. But I did go over to me we to get a lot of information there. So there’s good groups on me, we also if you’re, if you’re into that, so that kind of those are kind of my like, top favorite ones that we’ve been to. And I’m sure there’s plenty more out there. And I’d love to hear any advice or anything that y’all might have to send, I thought we’d wrap it up with some kind of social media rules that we’ve kind of come up with on our own. And I’d love to hear any of yours that you have. But here’s kind of the list of what I had. And one of the first ones is scroll on. You do not have to say something about everything or comment on something negatively. I take my mother’s rule of advice, if you have nothing to say say nothing at all. If you have if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. And I think that’s a great rule of advice for any social media. And we’ve sort of lost sight of that I believe, as a country and in a society that no, but that’s my very first social media rule. Secondly, just be positive, because there’s no reason to be negative. So you know, just tried to if you want to say something, say, Wow, beautiful pictures, thank you for sharing, those kind of things are helpful things for people, not we just don’t need negativity, or to change the topic of the conversation, which is so frustrating when someone says, you know, have a nice day, and then you go, how can I have a nice day when, you know,

George
Whatever,

Lisa RichartHernandez
you know, it’s it’s crazy. So just just be positive, provide relevant information, right? So like, if somebody says, What do you think, you know, do I need to move my tires, or roll by tires on my RV? Like, if you don’t know anything about it, like, you don’t have to say, well, you should, you know, also change your oil, you don’t need to change the subject. Like, that’s like when there’s a group of people 100,000 people on a page, like just adding that is just like sort of useless. And then it just fills up people’s feeds. And it’s hard for the moderators. So like, just have good group etiquette. So you know, like, there’s no need to chime in if the question isn’t regarding your own experience, right. Like, have you ever been in this place? No, but I saw it online and it looks horrible. Okay, well,

George
that’s not really the worst is when my friends cousins nephew went one time. And his mailman said not to go right like that has zero relevance. I mean, it’s like ninth hand information. Yeah, yeah. Talk about what you know, talk about where you’ve been.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Exactly. And you know what, also to contribute to these groups, like add information, like if you share information, share photos, share links, share information that’s relevant and helpful to the rest of us. And that’s like, huge and that’s how you become a positive influence on social media. Just by stating the facts, and not always having to state your opinion of things. Or say in my opinion, it was this, you know, it may be great for somebody else

George
to touch on the sharing. Everybody wants information, everybody wants to, if you have a problem, you want to know the solution to fixing it. So if you have the solution, give the solution and be done with it sometimes, and I’m a little guilty of it myself. Sometimes we overshare. So somebody says, I got a flat tire. Does anybody know where the jack is? Oh, yeah, the jack is in the back. But if you go upstairs and you flush the toilet first, while you move some water, we don’t need all that. Just where is the jack? You know, and I’m very guilty of doing the same thing as sometimes I just start rambling and something else comes up like I’m doing right now. So don’t overshare

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yes, and this is my last and final tip. And I think it should be a social media rule. And I don’t think that other people necessarily always realize this. But I’ve learned this over the years and being in social media. And that is, don’t bash other people on social media don’t say mean things don’t. There’s no need to jump in and say things like on somebody else’s feet, especially that are, you know, adversary, or controversial or starting fights or name calling. Because even though it may be only a certain number of people that are actually commenting or responding to you that people are reading, people are reading that and they’re seeing who you are, and they’re seeing what you do. And it’s kind of like, you know, I get people all the time, they’ll come up to Georgia and be like, Oh, my gosh, you know, I saw your pictures of this, you guys had such a great time, I’d love to do that. And I think to myself, wow. Like, this person has never commented on one of my Facebook posts, or this person has never even liked one of my Facebook posts, yet. They know everything about my life. They know the color of my living room furniture. And so people are watching. And I think that people don’t realize that. So, you know,

George
We’ve had people literally tell us that, oh, I never comment on Facebook, but I love all your posts. So they’re obviously looking at everything we do reading it and following us. And we love that. But not everybody’s posting. So just keep that in mind. They’re looking at what you’re

Lisa RichartHernandez
putting out, they’re making judgments about you based on the things that you say, and you may think that the conversation is between you and one other person in the feed or you know, several people in the feed. But that’s not the case. There’s, you know, if you’re being a jerk on camping as our life, there’s 133,000 people that are seeing you be a jerk, and not all of them are going to comment so. And the other is don’t bash people. The other problem with that also is you’re going on there too,

George
The other problem with that also is you’re going on there to you’re going on there for a reason. So you’re looking for an answer for something, or you’re trying to put some input and if you start constantly being a nag or a butthole Yeah, you’re gonna get knocked off the website, and then you know, you’re done, you lose that access. And it’s just not worth it. There’s enough drama going on right now in our society. Let’s all be positive, just put some positive stuff on there. And keep it clean. Leave politics for politics, websites. Let’s just share good experiences good fun and good information. And we’ll make the world go round much better.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Absolutely. So thank you all for listening in to our podcast this week. The biggest compliment you can give us is to share like or give us a positive review. Our reviews are would help us build our website and build our podcast following also if you go to RViewpodcast.com you can sign up there and subscribe. If you do subscribe. They will send you an email every time a new podcast comes out. So you get an alert and see what’s going on in our RV.

George
And don’t forget to leave us some comments. Let us know what you think of the podcast or let us know if you want us to talk about something. We may not be experts, but we’ll play experts.

Lisa RichartHernandez
There we go. Thanks, friends, and we’ll see you soon. Bye Bye.

intro
Thanks for listening to another episode of RView. Don’t forget to drop us a line at RView podcast.com that’s the letter R view podcast.com and like, subscribe and follow us so you don’t miss out on our next adventure.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai