More and more AYSO Regions and Areas are taking advantage of useful social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These sites can be great advertising for Regions, and help you reach potential families and volunteers you otherwise would not have access to.
If your Region utilizes social media, make sure that more than one person has access to the social media login information. While it's a good idea to have one person take ownership of the social media responsibilities, it's also smart to make sure that at least one other person has the administrative login privileges.
According to AllFacebook.com, Facebook will debut a new News Feed (say that five times fast!) pretty soon. The News Feed redesign (pictured above) will bring the mobile Facebook experience and the desktop Facebook experience closer together, by focusing on imagery and changing the font.
How will this affect your Region's page?
Facebook announced today they’ve updated their user guidelines and will no longer require that Facebook promotions be administered through third-party applications.
What does this mean? If you want to have a contest on your Facebook page, you don’t have to pay a Facebook-app company to create and administer it for you. Which is a huge time and money saver.
This means you can upload a photo to your Region’s Facebook page and ask people to leave comments, like or share to enter to win a prize. Many of you may have not known functions like this were illegal. They were! And if Facebook would’ve come across posts like this in the past, your page would have been in danger of getting deleted.
Facebook has debuted another fun new feature: post embedding. Embedded Facebook posts will allow you to take a post from your Region's Facebook page (or AYSO's National Facebook page) and embed it on a website, blog and more.
Once the post is embedded, users will be able to view the post anywhere you embed it, and engage with it by sharing, liking or leaving a comment. The above is a preview of what an embedded Facebook post looks like.
Embedding your Facebook posts on other websites is a great way to get your community engaged with your Region and drive valuable traffic to your Facebook page. Here's why:
I hope that you promote your Facebook page to all of your Region’s families and volunteers during registration events and the like. But if someone is out there on Facebook searching for your Region page, is it easy to find?
For example, if a user goes into the search bar, and types in “Region 32…” Region 32, Region 320, Region 3204 should all automatically populate in the drop-down predicted results. Or, if a user searches for their local AYSO by city and/or state, that should also automatically bring up results.
Here’s how to ensure that your Facebook page is searchable:
I spend a lot of time talking to RCs and Webmasters regarding social media best practices – especially about Facebook.
I get a lot of questions: How often should I post? What if someone posts something bad on my page? How can I keep up with a Region website AND a Facebook page?
But, before answering any of that, I always ask the person: What type of Facebook page do you have? Because if you don’t have the right type of page, you can be stopped before you even start.
All AYSO Regions, Areas and Sections should have a Facebook Business Page. If your Region has a personal profile, Group Page or Community Page, you do not have the correct type of Page.
Here’s why:
