What are the goals your NSO is trying to achieve by using social media? Is it to create or raise awareness of your sport; attract new members; increase engagement within your community; build member loyalty and increase retention; volunteer recruitment; deliver on sponsorship commitments, etc? These goals are not mutually exclusive, but an NSO may wish to focus a limited number initially instead of trying to cover every possibility.

Create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based) objectives based on the NSOs goal for using social media. For example, if your goal is to raise brand awareness of your NSO, you might want to increase the number of times your NSO is mentioned on social media by 50%.

These can then be used to determine performance benchmarks to strive for and Key Performance Indicators that you can use to measure your performance over time.

As part of developing your strategy, you should also consider how social media will complement and enhance your other marketing goals/objectives (i.e. drive traffic to your website, increase email marketing subscribers, enhance your overall communications strategy).

A quality social media strategy will focus on targeting the right people, with the right messages, at the right time. To do this, your NSO needs to clearly understand the ideal audience(s) they are targeting.

This is often done by creating audience personas for each of the main audiences you are trying to attract and communicate with (e.g. athletes, coaches, parents, sponsors, etc). For each audience persona you need to determine their common characteristics, which include their demographics and psychographics.

Demographic characteristics include: age, gender, location, profession, income level, marital status, etc. Psychographic characteristics include: interest, hobbies, habits, motivations, values, etc.

Once your target audience(s) have been identified, your social media strategy should focus on attracting those audiences to follow and engage with your NSO on social media.

Your NSO should develop an editorial mission that identifies the key topics and messaging that resonate with your ideal audience(s) and provides scope around what type of content is and isn’t appropriate to share on social media on behalf of the NSO. This will help set you apart and give your sport a unique brand voice. Anyone creating or curating content to share on social media on behalf of the NSO should be guided by your editorial mission.

Content created for sharing on social media should also comply with the NSO Brand and Style Guide. This should include guidelines relating to the use of brand colours, fonts, logo and images and be consistent across each social media platform.

To assist in ensuring compliance with these guidelines, your NSO may consider developing templates for images and/or video posts.

The NSO should also develop Tone of Voice Guidelines to ensure any social media content and/or conversations are consistent with the brand voice. This is particularly important if there is more than one person posting content and/or responding to comments on behalf of the NSO across the various social media platforms.

To keep the audience engaged, it is important to share a mix of content topics that resonate with the various audience avatars, as well as mix up the content format (e.g. images, videos, links, lives, etc), as different people will have content format preferences.

This should be tested over time to determine what type of content resonates best, the best time to post, ideal content frequency, types of calls-to-action and other variables that may impact the level of reach and engagement your content receives.

NSOs should also develop a strategy for the use of hashtags and tagging for those platforms where these features are available. It may be beneficial to create a list of hashtags for use under different circumstances. This can be a way to increase the reach of your content, as well as a time saver if this information is already curated and easily accessible to those people posting on behalf of your NSO.

Creating content can be a time consuming task for NSOs. To reduce the workload, NSOs should consider ways to repurpose content (e.g. taking an article written by a coach and creating it into several pieces of bite sized content, such as image posts). NSOs could also share user generated content, which often performs well. This would involve creating processes for capturing this content, gaining permission to repost and then sharing that content via the NSOs' social media channels.

Once you have identified your goals, defined your audience and determined what type of content you plan to share, you can then determine which social media platforms are most appropriate for your NSO to develop a presence on.

The most important aspect in choosing which social media platform(s) to use is your audience. For the best results, you should develop a presence on those platforms where your audience is already present and are interested in communicating with you via that channel.

Not all social media platforms are the same and therefore you may have to adjust the type of content shared and the way that it is shared so that it is appropriate to the context of the platform.

For example, Twitter has a character limit, Instagram requires an image or video to post and Facebook has multiple places you can post information (e.g. newsfeeds, groups, stories, events, Marketplace, Messenger, etc). The use of hashtags and tagging also varies between platforms.

NSOs should develop guidelines around when, where and how they respond to conversations, enquiries and/or inappropriate content on each of their social media profiles.

However, it’s just as important that you also have systems and tools in place that allow you to monitor any conversations happening on social media that mention your NSO or other aspects of your sport that you would like to be aware of or engage in discussions about, regardless of where they happen online.

This could include cross-platform keyword alerts, following hashtags or monitoring platform-specific notifications from each of the social media platforms where your NSO has a presence.

Monitoring beyond just your own social media presence is especially important, as not all conversations about your NSO or sport happen on your social media profiles and therefore without tools in place to alert you of these conversations, it is often difficult to be aware of them in a timely manner.

Joining in conversations on social media (external to your own profiles) can also help boost brand awareness and credibility, as well as expose the NSO to new and relevant audiences.

Conversations on social media can escalate quickly, so it’s important that the NSO has at least one person responsible for monitoring any alerts and have processes in place for escalating any potential issues as soon as possible once they are identified. Developing a procedure and assigning the responsibility for monitoring social media out of hours is also an important consideration.

Monitoring your NSOs' social media is also important from a compliance perspective. Just like with any other form of public communication, there are various legal issues that can arise from the use of social media: where social media use is part of an NSO employees' job description, workplace health and safety obligations will be owed to those individuals in the same manner as any other task they are required to perform; there are also defamation laws that apply to content posted on social media, which may extend to the administrator of a social media page for third-party content; and privacy and data protection laws may also apply to content posted by the NSO.

There are various tools available that can assist you with social media creation, monitoring, scheduling and reporting. Tools for managing social media workflow can also be useful for increasing efficiency.

There are various free or low-cost tools available for creating images, videos and other forms of content for sharing on social media, enabling your NSO to create large amounts of content on a low budget.

Scheduling tools can help save time and increase the chances of your NSO regularly posting content to the various social media platforms at the most appropriate times for generating the best level of engagement.

Monitoring tools allow you to be alerted about relevant conversations in a timely manner.

Reporting tools can ensure you are regularly measuring your performance against your objectives so that progress can be quantified.

Your NSO should determine which tools are most appropriate for your requirements and then make them available for use by those people within your organisation that are responsible for implementing the various elements of your social media strategy.

It is natural for people to look to others for social proof and influence prior to making decisions. People may seek out social proof from friends, experts, celebrities, other users, the crowd in general and/or some other stamp of approval.

This could include past or present athletes and/or coaches, State Sporting Organisation, clubs or other high-profile personalities within the sport or wider sporting community.

Being endorsed by any of these groups that influence the NSO’s audience can greatly assist your NSO in achieving your social media goals. An endorsement could be as simple as liking or leaving a positive comment on an NSO’s post, through to sharing content about the NSO on their social media platforms.

NSOs can facilitate this by forming relationships with those people and/or organisations that have influence over their audience and actively engaging with them on social media. Formal strategic partnerships, with clear deliverables as part of that arrangement, may also be formed as part of the NSO’s social media strategy.

Most social media platforms have algorithms in place that determine who sees what content and when. As a result, not all of the content you share on social media is going to be seen by all of your followers. Also, sometimes you want your content to be seen beyond your current following.

Social media advertising allows you to increase the reach for your content, targeting your desired audience, specific to your objective for each piece of content you are promoting.

NSOs that invest in the production of content to share on social media may wish to consider a budget to strategically promote key pieces of content (or calls-to-action) to ensure they get the best possible reach and return on investment for the time put into creating it and/or the outcome being sought. This may not always be possible for many NSOs, and in such cases having influencers and strategy in place is all the more important.

It’s important to regularly review your results against the performance benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators that you set when you established the social media goals and objectives for your NSO.

This includes determining what's working, what's not working and what you can improve upon across your social media channels. This includes auditing the success of the channels you are on, the content you are sharing and how well you are performing against your goals.

Platform-specific analytics, along with other metrics relevant to your goals, such as the amount of website traffic driven by a particular social media platform or membership growth statistics can help determine the success of your social media strategy.

The strategy should outline what formal reports need to be created, including the content, frequency and who they should be shared with.

It is also a good idea to audit the social media presence of other organisations targeting the same audience as your NSO (e.g. businesses providing services for your athletes) to learn from their successes and mistakes. Reviewing the performance of others can assist in determining which strategies may or may not work for your NSO.

Whilst social media platforms are ‘free’ to use, there are associated costs with using them, such as staff wages, content production, social media advertising, etc. This needs to be budgeted for, along with the appropriate resource allocation to effectively implement your social media strategy.

Where there is more than one person responsible for implementing the various elements of a NSO’s social media strategy, the roles should be adequately defined, with backups assigned for some of those roles (e.g. posting, monitoring) to ensure there is no disruption to service.

There should also be a budget allocated for staff training.