With no Volleyball to talk about and share how are you going to maintain your relevance and presence during the lockdown?

Here are a few tips on developing your social media, use it to get ready for the @Return to Play, keep members engaged, attract new members:-

Set SMART goals

Why are you on social media in the first place?

If your answer is a resounding “Uhh…” or “Because everyone else is on it,” you might have a problem.

Set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

An example of a good SMART goal for social media marketing would be something like “We’ll increase our Twitter response rate by 25% by the end of the first quarter.”

Make sure you are posting for a reason- avoid the trap of posting aimlessly.

Identify your audience

Who is your target market, is it members of your club or the wider population?

• How do you link to other social media sites?

• How often do you post?

• What does the content of your publication look like?

Make sure your content speaks to your defined audience.

Be human

One of the worst mistakes to make on social media is coming off as faceless with zero personality.

Crack jokes and talk to your followers like they are your friends.

Seek relationships, not just followers

Having 100 followers who regularly engage with you and your content are infinitely more valuable than 10,000 that ignore you.

If you’re not exactly sure where to start when it comes to relationship-building, here are some quick ideas:

• Always @mention people you reference in your social media posts

• Answer questions people ask

• Reply when people @mention you or share your content

• Don’t just Retweet and Like other people’s content; reply with a comment to start a conversation

Get visual

The good news is that getting visual doesn’t mean you need any sort of insane equipment or a full-blown production budget. Instead, consider imagery such as:

• Team photos or videos

• Photos of partners

• Photos of events

• Behind-the-scenes photos and videos

• Quote photos

• Infographics

And with so many tools to create social images and videos already out there, it’s easier than ever to get visual with your audience.

Make your presence known

If you’ve gone through the legwork of growing your social media presence, you need to let the world know.

From homepage feeds to icons on your site footer or email signature, anyone who comes in contact with your brand should only be a click away from becoming a long-term follower.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram feeds can all be easily integrated into your site with little more than a copy-paste code.

Stay active

During lockdown, rather than let your Facebook or Twitter gather cobwebs, you need to “show up” day after day with fresh content.

Some quick tips to help you stay active include:

• Incorporating social scheduling and automation to save time and energy.

• Finding ways to repurpose content so you’d not always trying to reinvent the wheel.

Piggyback on what’s trending

Between breaking news, trending hashtags or whatever the latest meme might be, get topical with their content.

Use tools to monitor your activity

When people complain about the lack of rate of interest they’re seeing from social, there’s a good chance they aren’t taking social seriously.

Just like we’re often knee-deep in Google Analytics data, marketers need to treat social with the same sort of scrutiny. There are tons of analytics tools out there to help you identify your top-performing content, performance trends and essential break down your social media presence by the numbers. These data points can help you treat social media less like a guessing game and more like a science.

Create content people actually want to see

If you want to stand out on social media, you can’t just parrot the content everyone else is posting.

In short, you need to create.

Maybe it’s an eye-popping snapshot you took during last season.

Either way, you should strive to post content that forces your followers to stop in their tracks.

There’s a lot of noise out there on social media: make it a goal to break through it.