Sports Technology

Dedicated to helping volunteers and grassroots sports clubs, over the last year Sports Community staff have visited and spoken to many clubs on the use of social media.

During their training courses, Sports Community has found that while most clubs use facebook and some use twitter, nearly all are using both with no clear strategy.

As a result, Sports Community Content and Media Manager Joe Novella believes that clubs are often missing out on all the benefits social media communication affords.

Novella suggests a three point plan for clubs to use social media effectively:

1. What are your club's objectives?

Social media communications should reflect a club's objectives. If a club is focused on attracting new members then having a closed facebook group is pointless, a facebook fan page will work much better.

If a club's objectives include securing more volunteers then its social media should reflect this with recognition strategies such as having a 'volunteer of the month'.

If a club wants to engage younger members, then using twitter to post results as they happen will make them feel involved, especially if they see their name up in lights, and more likely to renew their membership year on year.

2. Understand the value propositions of both facebook and twitter

To use social media tools effectively, clubs should try and understand their strengths and weaknesses. Facebook is an informational tool that is easy to use and perfect for keeping members updated on the goings on at the club including events and fundraisers.

It is also great at allowing the club to attract potential new members by encouraging the general public to visit and like a club's facebook page. What it is not good at is real time updating of information.

A club that updates their facebook page 20 times in a day is likely to lose their followers. However, in the twittersphere, you cannot update enough. In fact, twitter followers expect a constant stream of information which makes twitter a perfect tool for results posting and event day updates where there are lots of activities happening that can be promoted through a club's twitter feed.

Sports Community encourages clubs to have a facebook and twitter presence and to have a mix of informational communication (volunteer of the month, upcoming events, and so on) and real-time updates (results).

3. Engage your followers

Variety is the spice of life, and that also applies to social media. A facebook page that has the same information posted day in, day out, will not capture the imagination of your club members or potential new members.

Facebook allows the posting images and video. It allows a club to post links to other interesting sites and articles. The list below represents the different types of communications you could include in your facebook posts:

Statements such as 'training is cancelled today'

Pictures
Videos
Links
Questions
Polls
Invitations to events
Jokes

Sports Community suggests clubs use a mix of posts while monitoring 'likes' to see what form of communication is engaging club members the most.

Twitter is similar in that clubs can vary the way they communicate with followers with: tweets, retweets, direct messages, images, videos and so on and again making use of all these options will give a club the best chance of engaging your community.

Novella summarises the challenge, stating "many clubs choose to ignore social media, treating it as the tool for the 'young ones', but what should be happening is club committees own their social media and develop a strategy to make sure it is used as a tool to achieve club objectives.

"Most clubs have members that are proficient in the use of facebook and twitter, the mistake the club makes is letting them loose with no direction and no goals.

"Change that and your club will reap the benefit of these awesom

joe@sportscommunity.com.au
http://sportscommunity.com.au