Like Facebook, people use Twitter both personally and professionally, so you have a wider network of people to potentially reach through your marketing efforts. As a sports league, Twitter can be a great tool to get message out to your athletes and parents. But it is also an amazing marketing tool!
In this post we will offer up a few guidelines on how to use Twitter exactly for that and how you can make sure that when using this great tool you are not making mistakes that might actually cost you clients instead of bringing them in 🙂
Twitter can be overwhelming for some, especially when translating the features of the platform into a useable marketing tool, as opposed to just following celebrities or reading news headlines. Below are 4 helpful tips to using Twitter effectively for your sports league.
1. Have a plan.
Consider setting up a ‘strategy’ or ‘plan’ before beginning to promote your league so that you achieve your goals. No one wants to follow you on Twitter if your content is just going to be “Can’t wait for the game this weekend” or “Fun practice today!”, etc. Vary your content and put out messages that engage your followers, and that will encourage them to share your tweets!
Some examples of great sharable content are: updates about the teams in your league, photos from the latest game, event or practice, or you could even poll your followers to get their opinions or preferences on changes you are thinking of making. If you follow, and are followed by, members of your community, tag them in posts to get them excited to engage with you on social media, and to potentially retweet your tweets! If someone had a great game, give them a shout out, “Great game this weekend @awesomeplayer!” Good social media content is a balance between engagement with your audience and plain old good content.
There are tons of places you can begin to gather followers. Be sure to include a link to your Twitter profile or a “Follow us on Twitter” graphic in the following places…
- Your website
- Your registration page
- Your Sports management software
- Your “Thank you” page after registering
- Your “Thank you for registering” email
- Your Follow up emails to your clients
- Your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, etc profiles
- Your blog
This kind of engagement will only generate excitement about your league but will also make your followers feel as though they are a part of shaping their experience with you.
The goal with any marketing campaign, including social media is to reach your target audience and get your league on their radar as well as register for your activities.
2. Take advantage of #Hashtags.
There is no science to creating a hashtag, but once you decide on what yours is, include it in EVERY tweet that’s relevant. If you are tweeting about your swimming league, and your tweet content is about an upcoming meet, practice or pool info, always use #swimming (or a hashtag that incorporates your league name + swimming).
Not only should you invite those who register (in a “thank you for registering” email for example) to connect with you on Twitter, you should also begin following relevant people on Twitter. When you are notified on Twitter that someone is following you usually check them out and decide whether to follow them back, so this can be a great tool to get people you want to notice your league, to actually notice it.
Be sure to include the hashtag on all of your non twitter marketing literature – fliers, emails, etc. People who are savvy with Twitter will tweet about your league and will use your hashtag if they know what it is (they will know by seeing it everywhere so they can’t escape it!).
With appropriate tweets, also include a call to action for followers. “Please RT” is a great and simple way to solicit help from clients to retweet your messages (with your hashtags!) to reach more people.
3. Offer Incentives Exclusive to Twitter Followers.
It’s never a terrible idea to include freebies or prizes for followers when they help spread the word about your league. What’s one free registration fee or a credit to buy your league’s gear when a follower shares your posts and potentially brings in more paying clients? Offering incentives are always fun but it can also sweeten the deal for a follower who might be on the fence about registering, so an incentive opportunity might encourage them to register in the end. And winning things always makes people happy!
A good example of an incentive post on Twitter could be “RT the next post for a chance to win 25% off your registration fee!”. The ‘next’ post is then a great, general tweet about your league that your followers and event participants can RT or retweet to all of their followers. The Tweet should include the name of your event, the date and a link to the main event page, as well as your Twitter handle. If you’re offering a class of some sort, you can also offer a free class to the first 10 people who share a tweet that they are attending your class. The tweet should include your twitter handle, a link to your website and your #hashtag.
4. Consider a 3rd Party App to Manage Your Twitter Account.
Using a 3rd party app to manage your Twitter account or accounts. The top 2 favorites around the web seem to be Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.
We love Hootsuite since it allows you to incorporate other social media profiles (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google +, etc) as well as Twitter. We love it because you can add several types of ‘streams’ to your dashboard. For instance, with Twitter you can create several lists. Say, companies you want to reach out to or influential people in your industry you’d like to reach out to and help publicize your league. Each list can then become a stream, shown side by side within your Hootsuite dashboard so you can easily see and manage tweets on one page that you’d otherwise have to open in several tabs or windows in your browser.
You can also schedule tweets in advance, complete with hashtags! This is an amazing tool for the multi-tasker! Obviously some Tweets with regards to your business can’t always be scheduled since information is always changing, but you can set up tweets to go out with generic excitement building statements to go out once a week, schedule articles you’ve found that might be of interest to your followers over the course of a few weeks, etc. Even if you schedule tweets only a day or two in advance, being able to write a tweet and set it up to publish for a certain date and time in the future is incredibly helpful, especially when you have a million other things going on!
While it doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, managing your Twitter profile in an app like this can really help you organize and streamline your marketing efforts while using Twitter.
We hope these tips have helped you understand Twitter better and what a great tool it is to market your sports league!
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