If you’re asking the question on if you should use social media for your youth sports league, that means you’re either new to social media, new to youth sports, or both.
Just about everyone is on social media these days. For most, it starts with a Facebook account followed by either a Twitter or Instagram account. Of course, there’s Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn to name a few others. If you’re only just now exploring these channels, you’ll discover how incredible they are at connecting people.
If you’re a youth sports coach, leader, or organizer, social media is a powerful way for you to keep everyone in your community updated and interacting. According to Social Media Today, teens now spend up to nine hours a day on social platforms, while 30% of all time spent online is now allocated to social media interaction. The average person will spend nearly two hours (approximately 116 minutes) on social media every day.
When you think about how often the parents of your athletes and your athletes themselves spend on social media, you recognize that it’s a great channel to keep everyone connected because everyone is already there.
Furthermore, having a social media presence is excellent for fundraising. By having an account on social media for your league or team, you’ve got a platform to spread awareness quickly. You’ll cast a wider net because of social media’s sharing capabilities.
Here’s how to get started:
Worldwide, there are over 2.01 billion monthly active Facebook users for June 2017. Five new profiles are created every second. Average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes.
As the most used social network, you’ll find most of your athlete’s parents on Facebook. By creating an account on social media for your youth league, you offer parents and athletes an easy way for them to contact you.
It’s also a great place to keep everyone informed of updates, schedules, and general announcements. With most people scrolling through their Facebook feeds every day anyway, it will be hard for them to miss.
Facebook is also a fun place to post photos and videos of anything to do with the league. Parents and athletes can share their own photos on the page as well. To invite more engagement to your Facebook page, you should enlist someone to capture photos at your games and practices. You may even want to invite a particularly social media savvy parent to share their photos with you that you can post them on your league page.
While you’ll get more interaction on Facebook, Twitter is ideal for sharing news, event reminders, sharing links, and sharing tweets from others. Many pro athletes are on Twitter and retweeting a motivational tweet from a star athlete may be good for your followers.
Instagram is perfect if you or someone in your organization is great at shooting video or taking photos with their mobile. Visual content is super fun, and Instagram is the place to share it. Parents and athletes will love seeing photos and videos of them in action. You can choose to keep your Instagram account private to only the followers you approve, ensuring that only those in your community have access to the images.
Remember, while your priority in having a social media account or accounts for your youth league is to keep the involved community up-to-date, it’s also the ideal place to make connections for sponsorship opportunities.
Local businesses that will want to sponsor you will love that you have a social media that can do marketing from them by sharing their Facebook content or retweeting their Tweets. Having a social media presence is very appealing to businesses who are seeking to be involved in an organization that has an active audience.