How to use Social Media to achieve your goals
in the tennis community
By Rich Neher

Social media provides you with a great opportunity to reach and engage with more potential members and clients than ever before. A successful social media presence can benefit your club or your program in a number of ways. But if you waste too much time or money on ineffective tactics, then it doesn’t matter how efficient you’re being.

Here are two subjects that may be of help for you:

A. How to use social media effectively at your club or in your program

B. 5 time saving tips for tennis professionals using social media

Social media can take over your life if you let it. If you don’t come up with a plan for managing social media, then it will manage you.

Lets start with

A. How to use social media effectively at your club or in your program

1. Ask yourself “What are your club’s objectives?”

Your social media communications should reflect your club’s objectives. If your tennis club is focused on attracting new members then having a closed Facebook group is pointless, a Facebook fan page will work much better for you.

If your charity tournament’s objectives include securing more volunteers, then your social media should reflect this with “volunteer of the month” and other recognition strategies.

If you want to engage the younger members of your club, then using Twitter to post results as they happen will make them feel involved, especially if they see their name up in lights. I briefly talked about it earlier when we discussed the Millenials.

2. Understand the value propositions of both Facebook and Twitter

To use social media tools effectively, you should try and understand their strengths and weaknesses. Facebook is an informational tool that is easy to use and perfect for keeping your members updated on the goings on at the club including events and fundraisers.

It is also great at allowing the club to attract potential new members by encouraging the general public to visit and like your club’s Facebook page. What it is not good at is real time updating of information.

A club that updates their Facebook page 20 times in a day is in danger of losing their followers. However in the Twittersphere, you cannot update enough. In fact, Twitter followers expect a constant stream of information. And that makes Twitter a perfect tool for results posting and event day updates where there are lots of activities happening that can be promoted through your club’s Twitter feed.

I always encourages clubs to have both a Facebook and Twitter presence and to have a mix of informational communication (volunteer of the month, upcoming events, and so on) and real-time updates (like results, calendar changes, etc).

3. Engage your followers

Variety is the spice of life, and that also applies to social media. A Facebook page that has the same information posted day in, day out, will not capture the imagination of your club members or potential new members.

Facebook allows you to post images and video. It allows you to post links to other interesting sites and articles. The list below represents the different types of communications you could include in your Facebook posts:

1. A statement – e.g. “Happy Birthday, John”

2. A picture of a club event, a member, a pro

3. A video of a clinic

4. All link to the Grand Slams

5. A question – e.g. “What do you think of Roger Federer’s chances of winning Paris?”

6. A poll of your members about opening hours and court time

7. An invite to an event

8. A joke, an anecdote

Mix it up a little and monitor the “likes” to see what form of communication is engaging your club members the most.

Twitter is similar in that you can vary the way you communicate with your followers with: tweets, retweets, direct messages, photos, videos and so on and again making use of all these options will give you the best chance of engaging your community, members and non-members alike.

In summary

There are still clubs out there that choose to ignore social media, treating it as the tool for the “young ones” but what should be happening is that a club owns their social media and develop a strategy to make sure it is used as a tool to achieve club objectives.

Most clubs have members that are proficient in the use of Facebook and Twitter, the mistake some clubs are making is letting them loose with no direction and no goals. Change that and your club will reap the benefit of these awesome tools.

Looking at my Facebook page you can clearly see how I engage all sorts of people. I bring in tennis news daily through various news feeds I’m watching, mainly through “Google Alerts.” I throw in personal stuff and the occasional political rant, which is bad, but I can’t stay away from it. I also engage others by commenting on their posts. The result: Check out Rich Neher on Facebook. Over 4,800 friends. Now this is a profile page, not a business page. I do have a business page for my Tennis Media Group business and for my California Social Tennis Network and I recommend for you guys to start a FB business page for two reasons. First: Google is indexing those pages, not the profile pages or groups. That means they show up in search engines. And the second reason: Pages come with Analytics. Facebook enables you to gain insights into the performance of your page, how many people you’re engaging, how successful some posts are compared to others.

B. 5 time saving tips for tennis professionals using social media

Tip #1. Reverse Engineer Your Success
The single, most common reason people struggle with social media is because they don't have a clear direction. Social media can benefit your tennis business in 3 major ways:

- Increase awareness
- Reduce costs
- Increase profitability
What would that look like in real life, what does it mean?

Increase awareness of your tennis club or program faster, cheaper than other methods.
Reduce costs usually spent in member acquisition and advertising your programs
Increase profitability through improving conversions and membership renewals
Going through social media to spread the word is definitely faster and cheaper than print ads or direct mail campaigns. The conversion cost comparison for new members shows social media a clear winner. And social media engagement is nowadays a significant factor in member experience and therefore member retention.
Not only will you be more effective in hitting your goal, but you'll also save a lot of lost time that would have been spent chasing down ineffective tactics or distractions.

Tip #2. Funnel New Members from Other Sources
The best way to grow ANY social network is to funnel fans from an existing resource.

Some of these you might “own” (like your street traffic, website traffic, or email list), and some of these you might “borrow” (like cross-promotions or advertising).

Incentivize your loyal member database with "free stuff" like a free lesson or clinic, if they leave you a review on Yelp. Or you could get more Facebook fans by identifying business partners and running a joint Facebook promotion and cross-promotion.
Example: When I was managing a tennis and fitness club in the LA area I had an arrangement with a smoothie store close by. Our members got a nice discount in their store and we promoted them on our Facebook page.

In the long run you need to be careful about driving people to something you don’t own (like your Facebook page) instead of something you do (like your house email list). But in the short run, funneling fans through Facebook for quick growth is the best bet.

Tip #3. Chunk and Divide Your Time Effectively
There’s an old adage that says if you want something done, then give it to the busiest person you know. Whether that’s true or not — who knows. But it does raise an important point about setting constraints and prioritizing your time.

There's almost never a reason to spend longer than 20 minutes on social networks at one time. Schedule your updates automatically (I talked about this earlier today, using Hootsuite, for instance).

Use time tracking software to keep yourself accountable (Rescue Time or Toggl are such time tracking applications. With so many distractions and possibilities in your digital life, it’s easy to get scattered. They help you understand your daily habits so you can time yourself and focus and be more productive).

You’ll be more active throughout the day, and each time you check-in you’ll have a purpose because you have no time to waste.

Tip #4. Let Data Be Your Marketing Guide
The best way to be successful in marketing is to do more of what people like, and less of what they don't. And the best part about digital marketing is that you can see -- and track -- exactly what people do and don't like.

So stop guessing about what to say or do, and use more data to glean insights and drive action. (Examples)

For example, Facebook Insights gives you a wealth of information about the audience on your Facebook page. You can drill down into their demographics to understand who they are. Or you can dive deep into what they “Like” and click to see what motivates them.

After consulting this data, you can come up with conclusions about what to do next. And you won’t have to guess or post something random to “feel” like your being efficient.

Because in social media (and Facebook especially), it doesn’t matter if you have millions of fans. It all depends on how many of those people you can actually reach and if they’re paying attention or not. That’s why engagement is so important.

Tip #5. Start at the Top, Not the Bottom
There are basically two different ways to build up a social media presence…

The first is to “start from the bottom” and get new fans on a one-to-one basis. This approach works (slowly), and takes hours upon hours of effort.

If you can work from the top down, and reach a lot of people at once then you can accelerate your results.

For example, find other partners that have influence over many of your target audience. By reaching large numbers of highly targeted people at once, you'll drastically multiply your results while minimizing your time investment. They could be other websites, communities, organizations, blogs, or influential people.

You want to reach those influencers. For instance, if you ask me to LIKE your Fan Page, a whole bunch of others will see what I just liked and follow. All of a sudden you have accelerated your fan count.

And figure out what you can give those influencers that they don’t already have. Do NOT ask them for a favor. A media website probably wants content, while a nonprofit wants volunteers and donors.

If you can identify and provide what they need, then it will be easy to get what you want (i.e. promotion, sharing of their content).