I’ve been informally brainstorming some social media growth ideas for the Darwin Dingoes – a local basketball club participating in the Darwin Basketball Association.
I believe the club should have two approaches to their Facebook strategy: building a strong presence through a Facebook page and improving communication via a Facebook group.
With the page, we have been working on creating more engaging content and modelling an approach based around what has been successful for NBA clubs. Many of the content strategies used by multi-billion-dollar organisations with huge marketing teams like the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics can essentially be replicated by smaller basketball clubs with zero advertising budget.
The Dingoes have made great progress starting with simple things like score updates and player features created through the free resource Canva, but hopefully it can progress to more engaging, shareable graphics and video content.
Visually engaging pieces based around player highlights, pre-and-post-match interviews, warm-up clips and far more all qualify as strong content. Of course, the best way to determine ‘strong content’ is to look at the engagement metrics – likes, comments, shares – and gravitate towards creating more of what has worked well in the past.
We also covered the basics like inviting all existing club members to like the page. Smaller clubs must have a buy-in from existing members to grow their socials. At the beginning, literally ask people to like your page and ask them to share it with their friends and family. This initial growth is important to establish a larger following down the track.
Sporting clubs of all sizes should not discount the importance to having a social media strategy. Building a strong brand and identity can have immeasurable benefits within a local community.
A strong social presence will present to prospective players, sponsors and the broader community that this is a reputable basketball club to associate with. To emphasise this point further, this could mean more and higher quality players wanting to join your club, larger sponsorship offers and better leverage when negotiating deals, and numerous other opportunities within the community.
The second aspect to their social strategy would be to create a Facebook group for their current players and support members.
This can be a hub for the important, but less engaging, information like fixture information, club notices, training changes, etc. It can be used as a more private, intimate platform to communicate about upcoming game strategies or review performances, depending on the group’s privacy settings.