Effective use of Social Media for a Sports Club

The key to success of SoMe activity in Sport Clubs is very close related to a good strategy as well as to a good content creation

Autor Elisabetta Negri
Datum 04.07.2017
Lesezeit 5 Minuten

As seen in my former post, Use of Social Media in SPORT CLUBS (link), the key to success of SoMe activity in Sport Clubs is very close related to a good strategy as well as to a good content creation.

Which strategy should be good for use of SoMe in Sport Clubs:

According to Kaplan and Haenlein: the strategy should start from focusing on the right choice of SoMe according to the target of the customer and to the kind of content. (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).

Very important is the alignment of the activity in all the kind of SoMe involved, as well as integration with the traditional media plan. It means to coordinate the coherence of the message through the different kind of Media involved.

To optimize that, the club should evaluate to have a person dedicated to the communication.

The choice of the right Social Media depends, first of all, on the target group to be reached, and in second instance, on the message that has to be communicated.

How can a Sport Club make the best use of contents in SoMe

Together with these strategic guidlines, Kaplan and Haenlein also recommend 5 important points about use of the contents:

  1. be active: that means always produce fresh contents and engage in discussion with customer;
  2. be interesting: that means interact with your customers, listen in what may be interesting, enjoyable and valuable for them and create contents tha can fulfill these expechtations;
  3. be humble: that means understand how SoMe world works, before jumping into and posting whatever you think might be good;
  4. be unprofessional: means that you don’t need to be perfect to post something, your customers may not be perfect too;
  5. be honest: it means knowing and respecting the rules of the games.

Which use can sport clubs make of Social Media:

Sport Clubs can use Social Media to communicate with their members with different goals. One goal can be the increasing of the brand awareness; a second goal could be to sell services for sponsors as well as sell goods.

The key to the success of social media is to get all club members joined or subscribed to the social media platforms of the club.

Facebook is one of the favorite SoMe of Sport Clubs (ex: NBA Facebook page has 32.823.418 members), because of the very high rate of interaction (likes, comments, share ). The high interaction with the messages allows the club to have eyes and ears on his own customer, and adapt quickly to the needs of the audience.

Tools like Facebook can:

  • Inform club members of upcoming events
  • Inform club members of training changes
  • Inform club members of news
  • Share photos and videos of team triumphs
  • Sell merchandise or tickets to events
  • Sell sponsorship space (naming rights to the club’s facebook page)

 

Twitter is also beloved by Sport Clubs (NBA Twitter has 25,4 K Followers) and by sportsmen too, due to the possibilities of sharing short messages (Ex Roger Federer on his Twitter account has 7,42K followers).

Other SoMe platforms like Instagram and Youtube are as well useful for sport clubs, due to the kind of contents like sharing of photos and videos in real time. Through the right choice of images and video the club can communicate emotions and increase the motivation of joining.

Conclusion

Social Media allows to engage a big number of customers in shorter time and at relatively low costs in comparison with traditional communication tools. But this does not mean that the use of Social Media is easy. For the success it needs maybe a new way of thinking the communication with the final client, as well as a good strategy on target and contents.

In a next post I will try to compare different SoMe used by some very known sports clubs.


Über den Autor

Elisabetta Negri