Using Facebook for your group
Facebook presents a powerful platform for community sports organisations looking to expand their reach and impact. With over 38 million active users in the UK, it offers access to a vast and diverse audience.
Facebook is home to many community sports groups, offering a great opportunity to connect with your target audience. By delivering engaging and relevant content directly, your group can foster deeper connections and tap into your local community.
What are your goals?
Think about your objectives and aims in creating a Facebook presence. Consider what you want to achieve whether that is communicating with existing participants, reaching new audiences or driving engagement with your group.
Consider how you can use Facebook to achieve these goals, it may not be suitable for all your aims, so don’t try to shoehorn them in if Facebook is not the right platform. Remember Facebook is all about sharing content.
Who is your audience?
Very much linked to your aims and goals – if your goals are about communicating with existing participants you may wish to use a closed group for privacy and safeguarding reasons. If your goals are about recruiting new participants then your audience is people you don’t already know and have contact with – a private group won’t work for this, so you’ll need to consider how to reach out to those potential new recruits. It will help to know their demographics, interests, behaviours, and what drives their passion for sport and activity. Tailor your messaging to align with their motivations – whether that’s supporting a favourite team, staying active, or being part of a community.
Shout about what makes you you
Your group will have its own unique amazing qualities and strengths. Highlight these and show off what makes your group great. Use visually engaging content such as photos and videos to really showcase what your group does well. Do remember to consider safeguarding, privacy and permission before posting photos of other people, especially children. See this resource on Photography for digital marketing.
Sharing content from participants
The people who already attend your group can be your best friends when it comes to engaging and promoting your group – after all they are already benefitting from your activities so are in a great position to tell others about the group.
Encourage your participants to share stories, testimonials and photos (subject to permission) on Facebook. Your content will grow in both quantity and authenticity.
Call to action
Use clear and strong language when writing a call to action: “Buy tickets now”, “Come to our open day” and “Sign up for the newsletter” are all good examples of clear calls to action which will guide your readers towards the next steps you’d like them to take.
Facebook ads
To further expand your reach, you can run targeted campaigns through Facebook Ads Manager. Whether you’re aiming to increase page likes or generate leads, these ads allow you to connect with the right audience and grow your following effectively.
Do consider what you’re aiming for – do you want to increase ticket sales? Direct people to your website? Or sell merchandise? Consider your aims carefully to ensure a successful and useful advertising campaign.
How to get the best out of Facebook
Keep content updated and fresh, even when things are slow, but do keep it relevant and don’t go overboard on quantity – best to stick to a schedule you can maintain with high quality posts.
Make your content easy to find by using personalised hashtags, you can check which posts are popular by looking at who’s liked and commented. You could consider getting your members involved with polls as a way of engaging.
Using photos and videos of your members can really showcase what you do and also helps any newcomers to see what to expect. Do consider privacy and ensure you have a way to check permission for posting photos and videos.
Don’t stress out too much about what to post, there’s no need to over-think it as you’ll learn what sort of content works for your group as you go along.
Facebook Groups and Pages
Facebook Pages are intended for organisations to build a presence and share updates with a wide audience. In contrast, Groups are built around communities and shared interests, offering a space for members to connect and discuss specific topics.
Facebook Groups offer different privacy settings: they can be public, private, or hidden. Public groups are open for anyone to find, view, and join. Private groups require admin approval to join, and only members can see the content. Hidden (formerly called “secret”) groups are not visible in searches and can only be accessed by invitation.
Groups encourage interactive, two-way communication where members can post, comment, and engage freely with one another. If you plan to use a members-only private group, think about how you will define who can join and ensure this is shared with your members.
Facebook Pages are more focused on one-way communication, where updates are primarily shared by the brand, and followers can react or comment. Pages are always public and accessible to anyone who wants to follow.
Both Pages and Groups can be created by any Facebook user, but the approach to managing them differs. Pages require content planning and brand promotion strategies, while Groups demand community moderation and engagement to foster ongoing discussion.
Use a Facebook Page when your goal is to promote your brand and share updates broadly. Choose a Group when your focus is on building a community and encouraging interaction around shared interests.
This video runs through the differences between Facebook Pages and Groups
Where to look for more information
If you’ve never used Facebook before, this cheat sheet is a place to start
Facebook For Dummies Cheat Sheet | dummies
How to Use Facebook – Complete Beginner’s Guide
Clubforce have a guide to all the Meta apps (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp)
SocialPilot have a guide to setting up Facebook groups
CharityComms have lots of interesting and useful resources including this one on how collaboration can benefit small groups.
