7 Essential Social Media Tips for Sports Management Professionals

Should you pursue a career in sports management, it’s important to learn how to navigate social media to create an online presence to help promote your brand. Sports marketers often use social media platforms to reach potential customers, but even scouts and sports agents can use social media to grow their businesses, connect with fans, and contribute to industry discussions.

That’s why it’s a good idea to keep certain social media tips for sports management professionals in mind. 

Sports Management Social Media Tips for Success

Don’t Just Stick with Text

The majority of your social media posts may consist solely of text. However, it’s still important to incorporate videos and images when it makes sense to do so. 

This is particularly true in the sports industry. Your followers are likely interested in dynamic content that captures the essence of an intense sports competition. Depending on the nature of your job, you might want to attend live sporting events when possible, get pictures, and take videos you can use as impressive social media content.

Take Advantage of User-Generated Content

One of the greatest challenges involved in social media marketing is the simple fact that regularly generating content worthy of sharing can be difficult. After all, social media marketing may be merely one component of your job. The odds are good that you have other duties and responsibilities you also need to attend to. Finding the time to complete all necessary tasks while also creating social media content on a regular basis might be a struggle.

Luckily, this can be easily overcome by encouraging your followers to create content that helps you cast a wider net on the various social media platforms you use.

For example, perhaps you’re handling social media marketing for a particular sports team. You could run a contest asking fans to take pictures of themselves in jerseys or related gear. Fans can post photos on their own social media pages with a relevant hashtag and a link to your social media pages. The one whose picture shows the most team pride will win a small prize, while your brand will benefit from increased exposure.

You will likely have to modify your approach depending on the nature of your sports management job. In general, however, it helps to remember that you don’t need to generate all your social media content yourself. There are also ways to get your followers to generate content for you.

Monitor Signs of Engagement

This is a social media tip professionals across all industries need to remember. Essentially, you can’t know precisely how effective your social media campaigns are if you don’t monitor them for signs of engagement. These may include likes, shares, retweets, comments, and any other examples of followers interacting with your posts.

Monitoring engagement trends helps you better determine which types of posts yield results and which are less effective. In turn, this helps you more clearly understand how to improve your social media efforts in the future.

Tell a Story

Social media experts often cultivate strong followings by crafting a narrative with their posts. A basic example of this would be a social media marketer for a sports team posting content throughout a season that tells a story about the team. This story might be about an underdog team defying the odds or a team of elite athletes pushing their limits and making history.

If you’re not promoting a specific team via social media, you might have to tell a different type of story. Maybe you’re a sports agent using social media to tell a story about one of your clients. Perhaps you’re a scout telling a story about a young prospect. As always, the specific type of work you do will influence your choices on social media. Regardless, you’ll be more likely to attract and maintain a loyal audience if you incorporate storytelling into your campaigns to a degree.

Be Competitive

One of the most common reasons people love sports is because they are competitive. Keep that in mind when you’re planning your social media campaigns. To some extent, it may make sense to interact with other teams and organizations on social media. You want to stay respectful enough to avoid coming across as too negative, but you also want to take advantage of sports’ competitive nature. Doing so helps generate an emotional response among your followers. They’ll be more likely to consistently engage with your content if they feel the same emotional connection with it that they feel with their favorite teams or players.

Stay on Top of Trending Stories

In many industries, social media professionals save time by automating their campaigns. They generate content ahead of time and use tools to schedule the posts. Doing so ensures they don’t need to spend time manually posting content themselves on a regular basis.

You may want to automate some of your posts as a sports management professional as well. However, in the sports industry, it’s more important for social media professionals to cover new developments and trending stories. After all, you can’t plan a campaign around a specific team or season if you don’t know how the season will play out. You need to consistently research and post about developing stories to ensure your content is relevant.

Choose Your Platforms Wisely

Not all social media platforms are worth using. You probably don’t have the time to run social media campaigns on every platform available. Instead, you need to determine what type of audience you want to target, then research to find out which platforms they use most often.

For instance, perhaps you want to reach a young audience. You might then prioritize Snapchat, which is popular among younger people. If you’re trying to reach more women, you would consider using Pinterest. Quite simply, your content is more likely to reach the right people when you choose the right platform.

As social media continues to play an increasingly important role in sports management careers, you need to make sure you’re leveraging its full potential. These tips will help you do so. Even if you don’t use social media very much in your job now, there’s a good chance you will in the future.