Hosting a football tournament takes months of planning, finances, and effort. But it will all be worth it once you see the stadium packed with energetic football fans.
To attract crowds to your upcoming tournament, you need to craft an effective social media marketing campaign. This blog highlights the steps you can take to successfully promote your football tournament on social media.
- Inform your audience about the event
Kick off your social media campaign by creating content that informs your audience of important details like dates and timings of matches, venue(s), participating teams, ticket vendors, and your contact information. This includes:
- Instagram and Facebook stories and posts
- Short-form video content like Instagram reels and TikTok
- A detailed tweet about the tournament that you can pin to your Twitter account
- Twitter header/banner and Facebook cover photo. These are some of the first things your account visitors will see on each platform, so make them count!
- Posts in sports-related Facebook groups.
With PosterMyWall, you can easily design social media graphics related to your tournament by customizing our professionally designed football social media post templates. You can browse through the 1.5k templates available, select the ones you like, and edit them to fit the theme of your tournament. Then you can publish these on your social media accounts from the same platform.
We also suggest creating a Facebook event for your tournament. With this feature, you can share important information, reminders, or any changes regarding the event, keeping attendees notified and engaged.
Moreover, people can also share the event with their network, increasing the event’s visibility and potentially attracting more attendees. Even if they don’t share the event and just interact with it individually, their activity can be seen by their friends, which acts as social proof. When people see their friends are interested in or attending an event, they may be more inclined to join.
- Build anticipation
Keep your audience hooked to your socials and excited about the tournament, so that they do not forget to attend it when it happens. Build hype around your event through social media content such as:
- Behind-the-scenes videos that show how the venue is being prepared for the tournament.
- Videos of players training for their upcoming matches.
- Teaser videos and Instagram stories with countdown timers til the inauguration ceremony.
Additionally, create a catchy hashtag for your tournament and add it to the captions of your Instagram posts. This will generate buzz and enable you to track conversations around the event.
- Leverage the networks of influencers
Sports influencers, such as current and former players, coaches, and sports journalists, tend to have a large number of followers on their socials. These followers are highly engaged audiences, which value the opinions of these influencers. So, if the influencers talk highly about something, their followers are also going to be interested in that thing.
Hence, collaborating with these influencers is great for effectively promoting your tournament among sports fans and potential participants.
You can either ask them to repost/ share the content of your social media accounts on their profiles. Or you can provide them with the details of the tournament and ask them to convey this information to their followers in the way they deem fit.
- Conduct contests
Host contests on your socials that require your followers to tag their friends (who also follow your accounts) under your contest/giveaway post and share your post on their stories. Then you can pick the winners through a lucky draw.
Conducting these contests will help spread the word about your tournament, and reward the followers that win the contest with free tickets or merchandise of your tournament.
- Post about the participating teams and players
Showcase the players and teams that will be participating in your tournament to create excitement among the potential attendees. Some content ideas for doing this include:
- Individual player spotlights. These are posts about the player’s recent stats and performance.
- Side-by-side comparison posts of teams playing against each other in a match. You can compare their players, stats, strengths, weaknesses, and past matches against each other.
- Reels that explain why a certain team is the emerging star or audience favorite.
- Run paid social media ads
With paid advertisements on social media, you can efficiently reach your target audience. That is because you will be paying for your audience’s undivided attention, and would not have to find your way around the ever-changing algorithms.
You can determine which people to target with your ads by looking at the analytics of your accounts. This data will show you the age, gender, and location of the people that interact with your content, and when they do so.
Once you are done selecting a target audience, you have to decide the days and duration of your ads based on your budget and the times your target audience is most active on social media. We recommend starting your paid advertisements at least two weeks before the tournament is set to take place.
Final thoughts
Promoting your football tournament on social media is necessary for its tickets to get sold like hotcakes. By following the strategies mentioned in this blog, you will be able to effectively spread the word about your tournament on social media and ensure that your tournament pulls the crowds that you want.
