Leveraging social networks
Last week we looked at using advertising campaigns to reach out to new club members. This week we explore how you can use social networks to really increase the reach of your campaign.
For a quick recap, we started with preparing for the recruitment campaign which provides an excellent outline to getting started, then to create and optimize club website followed by an excellent guide for effective advertising campaign.
This series of posts is designed to allow you to not only have an effective recruitment campaign for your sports club, but to show you how you can use marketing, advertising and social networks to your advantage.
37% of consumers say they use social networks to discover new things. They use social media to connect with new brands, products and services – and the vast potential reach of social networks makes them a must to promote your club. Choose the channels that work best for your community, and don’t be afraid of delegating responsibility for some social media management to trusted club members.
4.1 Choose the right social media channels
4.1.1 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
Setting up a club or team Facebook page and Twitter and Instagram accounts is simple and free. All three channels are great ways to engage with your community. Facebook has the most diverse reach and versatility of the three channels, with 78% of users accessing via mobile device. This makes for great real-time communication with both text and images. Twitter, on the other hand, tends to lend itself more to text-based communication.
Instagram is a particularly appealing channel, with more active users than Twitter and a higher rate of growth. Use it to instantly share images of training, competitions and social events with your community.
4.1.2 YouTube
If you can create regular videos of training, matches and social events, then it may be valuable to create a YouTube channel. You might do this by employing freelance professionals, asking local film or media students if they need ‘live’ experience as part of their course requirements, or if you have a willing and talented club member who can support you.
Club and community members can then subscribe to the channel for free to make sure they never miss a new video. By posting links to videos across your social networks, you can help connect your whole community.
4.1.3 Use a social media management tool
Managing multiple social media channels might seem like an arduous task, but can be made significantly easier by linking accounts, and using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. This allows you to schedule posts in advance to Facebook and Twitter, which then automatically publish at the time you have selected. You can also link your Instagram to your Twitter and Facebook accounts so that images appear simultaneously across all channels and to the widest possible audience.
4.2 Connect with your community
4.2.1 Invite followers
Once you have social media channels set up, you need to connect with your community. Invite club members, volunteers, coaches and your broader community to ‘like’ and share your Facebook page. Every time your club members ‘like’ and share posts, they become visible to more people, raising your profile organically.
4.2.2 Follow relevant feeds
Start to follow your own club and community members, local organisations, relevant national sports associations, and even competing local clubs on Twitter and Instagram. Not only will you start to see what’s going on within your sport and community, you will quickly gain ‘followers’ with whom you can share photos, links and updates.
4.2.3 Use hashtags and tagging
Get the best from your social media use by tagging people in tweets and posts, and using hashtags to allow your tweets and posts to be discovered by others. Look at the hashtags that are used by other similar clubs or by members of your community to find those that are relevant to you.
4.3 Leverage social media to tell your story
Now that you have started to build an audience, you can share the images and articles you selected while you were preparing for your recruitment drive. Research shows that people spend more than half of their time online reading content (and another 30% of their online time on social channels where content is shared). Post something every day that will appeal to your community, and people will like and share posts, raising your club or team profile.
4.3.1 Post something every day
Share articles every day as outlined in our Recruitment Drive Action Plan. Post once on Facebook, but schedule several tweets linking back to the same article (with variations in the tweet text) over the course of 1-3 days, for best effect. This can be simply arranged using a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer.
4.3.2 Start a conversation
Asking questions and starting a discussion about the articles you share is an easy and effective way to engage directly with your athletes, coaches, volunteers and community.
4.3.3 Be visual!
Share the images of training and competitions you collected while preparing your campaign, as well as links to your website and promo video. There are an astonishing 3 billion Facebook video views daily. Make sure your promo and training videos are among them!
Think about the images you choose for profile and background pictures across social media. These images will form the first impressions of your team or club for new visitors to your social media pages, so they need to represent you well. Use your logo as a profile picture. Set your background image to an impressive action shot, a well-conditioned squad, a display of medals, a famous coach or alumni, or a picture of a full trophy cabinet. By changing this image regularly, you keep your social pages fresh and interesting.
4.3.4 Celebrate successes
One of the best ways to use social media is to share and celebrate individual, team and club successes. Congratulate athletes on achieving personal best times, on winning games, or on getting through a particularly tough training session. Showcase your facilities with images of your teams working out together and display your club spirit with pictures of social and family events.
Summary
By choosing the right approach to social networking, your club or team can leverage powerful and growing channels to raise your profile and engage with your community every day. Recruiting new members has always been about getting a conversation started, to encourage potential members and help them take the first steps to signing up. Using social media, your reach goes right to the heart of your community, and starting a conversation to get more people involved has never been easier.
What’s next?
We talk about how it is time to engage your club community to get them talking, stay up to date with all relevant information with some great merchandise advice.
Downloads
Get the full e-book from here: Promoting a youth sports club
Related posts in the series
1. Preparing for the recruitment campaign
2. Create and optimize club website
3. Effective advertising campaign
4. Leveraging social networks (current article)
6. Final outreach + registration
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