You can promote your local recreation activities through social media. It is an effective and inexpensive way to do this. It only takes a little to make social media work. With the right tools and processes, it can also be a great way to engage your community.
Your residents likely use social media to connect. There are 4.65 trillion users of these platforms worldwide. Here are 23 proven best practices to promote your community’s recreational events via social media.
Tip: While reading our information, remember that you can be on only some social media accounts mentioned. You can leverage the existing platforms if you need more time or resources to manage them properly. We recommend starting with a Facebook account if your community doesn’t use social media today. You can then add another account such as Twitter in the future.
General Tips
Make sure to promote everything on social media. When you open a new course, class, or league, make sure to share it through all your social media channels. You can include a link that allows the public to register online using your recreation management software.
Make last-minute announcements. Send a series “Last Call”, tweets, and messages the day before registration closes for classes or leagues to create urgency. Include a link for online registration.
Tip from the Civic: Do you not have an on-site videographer yet? Today, many people consider themselves amateur videographers and photographers. Ask your community members to join you in shooting footage of important events. You’ll give them a credit or photo and tag your social media accounts. This will help you get free access to high-quality videos while also helping you grow your social engagement.
Encourage residents to leave testimonials after they have registered for community activities with your recreation management software. Encourage them to share their participation plans on social media. With a robust recreation management system, people can easily create a post on social media to encourage family and friends to view the same course registration details.
Get scheduling software. A resident communication tool will help you schedule your social media posts in advance via multiple channels and platforms. Spend 30 minutes planning your posts ahead of time and adding to them as necessary.
Facebook Tips
Create Facebook Events. To promote your event and allow people to RSVP, you can create a Facebook Event Page. Your event will be shared with your friends and followers by creating a status update on their news feed. This will allow them to share the information with their network.
Think about paid Facebook advertising. Pay social to promote the most profitable community classes, events, and courses. To promote registrations, you can invest in a Facebook advertising campaign for a few weeks prior to opening your softball league. Facebook makes it easy to target specific audiences and can easily set a campaign’s budget and duration.
Live stream events. You can stream live footage from key community events like the last five minutes of the junior league play-offs or a demonstration of glass blowing in one of your classes. Facebook Live is an easy-to use platform that allows citizens to interact with one another via live broadcasts. This will likely encourage citizens to sign up for future opportunities.
Use Facebook polls Get resident feedback through Facebook polls. Use an easy-to-manage Facebook survey to ask the public what classes or events they would like to see in their area in the future.
Tips For Twitter
Promote In-the-Now Remembrances Twitter is best for news and information that is timely. It can be used for closing day announcements, last-call reminders and sign-up deadline notifications. To help your community members find your stories, use relevant hashtags when sharing information and promotions about community events on Twitter. If you are promoting registration for the new archery class, include a hashtag for the community name and use additional hashtags like #archerylessons and #CommunityNameEvents.
Snapchat Tips
Reach GenZ. Snapchat can be used by creative social media influencers of our younger generation. You can capture the attention of your audience with photos, videos and drawings as well as clever captions. Use Snapchat’s filters and tools to be as creative as you can.
Tips For Instagram
Keep it visual. Upload photos and videos from recreation events in your area to Instagram. Use hashtags and place identification tags to identify your community facilities, just like Twitter. To increase your followers and shares, encourage residents to tag your community profile. The Stories feature allows you to receive in-the-now updates on the top events of each day. You can use it to capture the youth soccer championship game from the first clip of the players running onto the field to each goal to the last handshakes and celebration with the winning team.
Tips for LinkedIn
Find potential instructors. LinkedIn offers targeted advertising options that can help you find coaches, referees, and other professionals. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on advertising. Instead, you can target professionals in your area based on their hobbies and interests. You could target active adults aged 18 to 65 with ads for your adult-oriented community soccer league.
TikTok Tips
Get into the latest trend. TikTok allows you to upload videos. It is used by many users to make entertaining videos that show them performing the latest dance moves, sharing funny jokes, or sharing important moments from their lives. You will need to have some video editing and capturing skills from a team member, or a passionate intern. However, you can share funny and fun videos from events with Gen-Zers (and even their parents, yes, they are also on TikTok).
Get involved with your community leaders. Find the latest dance trend on TikTok, and then film your mayor or town council member giving it their best execution. Was that viral content?
Challenges in film sports. See how often it takes for your mayor to score a Steph Curry-inspired half-court shot. You’ll be able to share your social gold if they get it right the first time.
Use user-generated content. You might find it daunting to create regular TikTok content based on your existing staff and workflows. Instead, you can leverage local social experts and share user-generated content from local parks and events.
These best practices will help you increase citizen participation and extend your reach on any platform you choose.