Use of Social Media in Sport Clubs

When starting to think about using Social Media for the Sport Club organization I am cooperating with, I wanted to understand better how the SocIal Media world works, why should Social Media be integrated in the marketing strategy and which are the Key Success Factors for a better response to our goals of creating a community.

How we can define social media & user generated content

Social Media (SoMe) can have many different definitions, but I like how Kaplan and Haenlein define SoMe as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0. and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content (UGC)”, where the definition of “UGC can be seen as the sum of all ways in which people make use of Social Media”  (ref. Kaplan, A.M., & Haenlein, M. (2010) Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons (2010) 53, 59-68).

So said, the success of Social Networks, due to the simplicity, interactivity and real time action, is connected to the possibility of involving millions of users.

Why recommend use of social media in sport organizations

Sport organizations, to retain customers by establishing, maintaining, and enhancing relationships, need to communicate and engage in dialogue with their customers. To achieve this on a long term, sport organizations need to employ effective communication platforms. Social Media can represent, for a Sport organization or club, a valuable and fast way to increase visibility and an ideal tool for a continuing 2-way dialogue. As an example of why the use of Social media in Sport is worth: NBA Facebook page has 32.823.418 members, and the NBA Twitter has 25,4 K Followers.

Key success factor for social media in sport

One of the Key Success Factor is the ability of creating contents able to communicate identification with the brand values. This identification is a very important concept in order to attract Supporters, Sponsors and Partners.

Is important to create contents that are not only commercial, but original and able to transfer emotions. The amount of commercials contents should not be more than 20% on the total.

Sport is for sure one of the richest theme able to communicate emotions and nevertheless, in sport events we have the possibility of using very effective tools as:  videos, photos and real time sharing of results and success.

Which are the advantages or risks in using social media in sport

Advantages: the big advantage of the use of SoMe in Sport Club is the positive relation between low costs and benefits, due to the very active and fast moving domain.

Risks: the big risk could be a lack of strategy, or the creation of non original contents. This would bring to a loss of interest or a negative impact on the brand identity.

Conclusion

Social Media can represent a very effective tool for Sport Clubs that want to increase their visibility and reach in a short time a great number of customers.

Therefore, the use of Social Media is not easy and needs a good strategic plan and professional people dedicated.

In the next blog post i will try to focus on the guidelines of application of Social Media for Sport Clubs.