Just like Facebook, Twitter provides an ideal channel for leisure facilities to engage their current and potential customer base. Twitter is a micro message instant chat network that is growing fast. It has over 200 million users – 50 million log in every day. Twitter has so many possibilities, it can be difficult to know where to start. So to help you get started, here are eight steps that can help your leisure facility really make an impact.
- Setup a Twitter Profile – this allows other people on Twitter to follow your updates in their Twitter stream. This provides another way for people to keep in touch online and for your leisure facility to be found. Tweets (messages) can spread virally (spread fast) across the web beyond Twitter. It is reported 80% of tweets are accessed outside of Twitter.com; through search engine results, websites, blog sites and social media apps for browsers, desktops, mobiles and tablet devices.
- Setup Hootsuite – a social media dashboard application that allows you to plug in Twitter. Here you can manage your Twitter account much more effectively than on Twitter.com. You can also plug in other social media platforms like Facebook. This allows you to post a message on more than one platform at a time – saving you time! With Hootsuite, you can quickly see when your Twitter profile has been mentioned by others in their tweets. You can also easily see if there is a direct message that needs a response. Hootsuite manages Twitter data into columns that you can easily view on a single page on your screen.
- Tweet useful info – post news about new classes, for example zumba, timetable changes and new facilities. Also post other local area news to help to draw people to the profile. Twitter is also potentially a great place to interact with your members, helping you to provide better customer service. It is easy for followers to share content (retweet) that is of interest with their friends and family, which will quickly spread your news much further.
- Provide top tips on how to keep fit and healthy, manage diet and improve at particular sports etc. – this content is particularly likely to be retweeted by some of your followers to their friends. This will help you increase reach within your target audience. Top tips can be automated to go out on a recurring daily basis.
- Building a following from your target audience – follow people who follow local profiles, for example local newspaper profiles, as they are most likely to be local people. These people may choose to follow you back. This process can be automated to quickly build a following amongst a local target audience.
- Set up Twitter lists – assign Twitter profiles of particular interest to applicable Twitter lists. Filtering in this way will help you to engage with people of particular interest more often. This is particularly useful if you are following several hundred profiles. Otherwise, there will be too many tweets to keep up with in the main Twitter stream and not every tweet will be of interest. For example, you could have a list for members and a list for prospects. Additionally lists could be organised by different sports or activities.
- Setup Keyword Searches to track when certain leisure activities are mentioned for research or lead opportunities. Within Hootsuite you can set up a separate tab (a page within Hootsuite) and set up to 10 columns tracking keywords (the same goes for lists). This way you can quickly glance at the information and respond as appropriate.
Undertaking these activities in Twitter will help retain existing customers and encourage more people to use the leisure centre. This is particularly the case as tweets can so easily go viral within and beyond Twitter.
We hope you find this info useful. For more top social media and marketing info follow us on Twitter at @bigwavemedia.