Discussion: Managing Social Media

I initial wrote this under the Thursday Adventure Fun Runs thread, but decided it would be better to break out into it's own thread.

If anyone else has social media wisdom to share, I'd love to hear it.

BAOC's Facebook has 233 likes, which is a good start...
It's humbling. Pacific Coast Trail runs has 4,391 facebook members. Evergreen Trail runs has 1747.

But managing FB pages is quirky. You've got to work the system if you want to create page views. The best measure of FB page activity is probably not the number of member's your page has, but the number of 'active users'. That is, how many people actually view the page. Here is a timeline for BAOC's FB page:

Dec 2009: BAOC's facebook page was started. Member list shot up to 175 people within 4 months. But actual usage was dismally low. A couple people per day, at most.
July 2010: I started adding content semi-regularly, but usage stayed stagnant at about 25 "monthly active users." During any given month, less than 15% of members would view the page.
November 2010: I wrote to the BAOC board of directors, and asked them all to view the facebook page, and invited them to make comments and 'like' the posts. The BOD is only about 20 people, but this small jolt of interest had a nonlinear response. Monthly active users increased from 22 to 62 overnight. By December 2010, we were averaging over 100 MAUs.
March 2011: I was sick and busy, and neglected the FB page for a couple months. We hit a low of 30 MAUs. I resumed posting, and we slowly crawled back to about 120 MAUs (Took about 3 months).
August 2011: I wrote a note to the entire BAOC membership list, encouraging people to post. We got another small bump. We are now averaging about 145 MAUs. Now, 62% of the page members are actually visiting the page each month.

I try to keep an interesting mix of content on the page.
-Notes about upcoming events. (Reminders and late changes)
-Interesting notes about club business (new board members, etc...)
-Recognition of volunteers/winners/achievements.
-Interesting links. (Videos, training tips, etc...)
-Pictures (We don't have enough of these)
-Questions for light discussion.

I try to phrase stuff in a way that encourages "likes" or comments. As an admin, you can learn pretty quick which posts will be crowd pleasers.

Now we just need to get more people on the page. I expect numbers to go up during the fall orienteering season. Now, if we were really dedicated to cultivating new members (FB members or otherwise), we would have a regular follow-up with all meet participants. Essentially, I think each participant should receive a short, post race email with the following:
1) Thank you for attending
2) If you liked it, check out these fun upcoming events
3) To join our email list / FB page, click this link.
4) Check out the race results and routegadget, click this link.

But I haven't convinced the club that this is worth the effort yet. I'm working on that.

one reason our likes are lower than some other sports is that they don't have an Attack Point equivalent. AP in the FB of orienteering

Thanks for this Blegg! This is an area we could really use some work in as a community.

Do you have any knowledge of how many conversions this generates for BAOC, either in new members, starts, etc.?

As an admin for OttawaOC's facebook page I just added some (but not all) of our events this fall to the facebook page. Do you put your events up and if so does it help much? I only put some of our events up because our full calendar is very full and it would be better to target a few events... maybe that's the wrong approach

@ hammer AP is great for those of us that are already hooked on O...
I'd be willing to bet it generates a near 0 number of new members / starts

The larger an orienteering community on FB the better. Every club should have a page and like other club pages so people see the network of clubs and can browse from club to club.

I expect that overall exposure will climb exponentially with the number of clubs on facebook!

I don't disagree Jeff. just saying that if our 'chat' isnt on FB there is less likely for other friends to 'see' what we do. GHO has just purchased our first FB ad for Adventure Running Kids and are doing a few other FB PR suggestions on the advice of our marketing/PR company that we have hired.

No idea how many conversions the FB page generates. My hope is more along the lines of keeping BAOC fresh in the mind of our casual participants. So they are more likely to think of us when they have a free weekend.

Our FB page has proven basically useless (so far) as a discussion forum. Sometimes people share interesting info, but there isn't much back-and-forth. I also think it's unreliable as an information distribution system.

All the interesting conversations happen on the BAOC email list. Not attackpoint, really. That gets saved for discussions of national interest and communicating with orienteers outside the Bay Area. Unfortunately, for the last 3 years, we have been failing to get new casual members onto our email lists. That is another issue, and it's due to changes in post-meet followup.

I haven't bothered to create any event pages lately. They weren't generating much interest, and people weren't using them to indicate attendance. Plus, they were a lot of work to keep updated.

Since all BAOC event's have well designed traditional webpages (kept up-to-date by some great webmasters), I just try to use links and direct people there.

I administer a FB page for our local trail running club the Shenipsit Striders. A couple years ago our club membership was dwindling to near zero and we almost folded (or more appropriately merged with a road running club). Opted to make one more run at it and engage social media - a FB page was our choice.

We post a variety of notices etc to the page, but the primary function that has drawn in new blood has been to post training runs. Most of our core members are going out for trail runs regularly anyway, so we encouraged them to post the time & place (and pace if appropriate) and encourage others to join them. Running with a group also helps to motivate and maintain commitment to the training. And if no one shows, its no biggie, because you were going to go run anyway, right? But the more the merrier...

The problem that arises is that people have to visit the page to see member posts, whereas posts by administrators (ie me), get posted to each members wall. So when someone posts a training run, I generally repost (as admin), add it to the google calendar (included on our regular web page), and delete the original posting (unless others have already commented on it).

So what used to be just solo training runs now generally draw 4-15 people on average. Big groups can break into slow/fast groups etc. And we've been getting a variety of folks coming out to these runs - its not always the same dozen core members, but the 'leaders' of the runs tend to be regular members.

Some of these folks have gone on to join the club outright, but we're also fine with folks just getting out and socializing in the woods together, they don't have to join the club.

Another thing I do for runs I partake in, is to bring my camera and take a group shot before or after the run and post it to the FB page and have folks tag it. This helps break the ice for newcomers who have never run with us - they can see that we're not a bunch of scary looking deviants (or conversely, perhaps that we are a scary looking bunch of deviants...) But it does lead to newcomers coming to a run and coming right up to folks the recognize from the FB photos and introducing themselves. And it goes from there...

The MAUs for three Bay Area urban orienteering event series pages that I can cite are currently 293, 215, 191. The combined annual attendance of these events is about 20% of the combined annual attendance of BAOC (MAU 145 as Ben says).

Strider site mentioned above - 341 current 'likes', 436 MAU's....

I'm leading a Nipmuck Training run in the morning - since its not forecast to be pouring rain (like last Sunday), I'm hoping for a couple dozen attendees. We had 14 brave souls come out in the rain last week...

Yo TD, which sites are you citing? I'm curious, cause the only Bay Area urban orienteering pages I can think of are Get Lost!!, Terraloco, Street Scramble, and the SF Night and Day. And of those, Street Scramble is the only one with more 'likes' than BAOC. (Terraloco is getting close, but the other two are much lower). So I'm wondering where the high MAU's are coming from.

Is it photos maybe? Or is it a matter of generating comments, so our postings can get listed on "friends of friends" walls? Or something else that seems to drive traffic?

How much traffic can Get Lost!! attribute to their recent RRS promotion?

Does anyone find Twitter useful for orienteering-related stuff? I'm on FB, but I almost never use it. Twitter is a different story---I'm almost as compulsive checking it as AP. And so far, I almost never tweet anything, I just read.

The three sites are Get Lost!!, SFND, and terraloco (Street Scramble Facebook focuses on the Seattle events; Bay Area Street Scramble is on Get Lost!!'s page). I didn't notice much effect from the RRS promotion on Get Lost!!'s website traffic or on our Facebook MAUs or Likes. The Facebook MAUs for Get Lost!! have grown linearly since the launch in December 2010, I can't attribute their growth to any one particular factor.

I find Twitter is best for instant, or breaking news. For instance, when I couldn't be at my computer during WOC, I really appreciated OrienteeringCAN's frequent updates as the races unfolded. It's also great for following the training of individual orienteers. We have a Facebook page, because we are trying to reach college students. Likes have increased quickly, although only two students so far. I expect more people get our news from the website or emails, still. However, I'm interested in this discussion, and see new ways to use Facebook.

We use twitter mainly for weather cancellations or updates for our Adventure Running Kids program or races. we tell competitors and parents to watch the twitter feed when a weather warning has been issued.

It's not exactly social media but I just created a wikipedia article about the OOC. Not sure it will be all that beneficial but it can't hurt.

re: OOC wiki

How old is Gord Hunter?

"Gord Hunter (competed at the WOC in 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1997)"

perhaps that should be the years that BG raced at WOC.

Fixed, thanks Mike!

@cedarcreek... make sure you follow @NAOC2012, too.

At a bicycle scavenger hunt free event, done in occasion of a 10-day long Bike Fest, handed out some orienteering meet fliers to about 20 participants. A week later, was surprised to discover that the flier's text was OCR-scanned and made into Meetup events for a pet cat lover's group and a weight-loss group.

An orienteering meet gone viral. That's a first. [PS: notice that the title uses the words "Land Navigation", not "Orienteering". It's more friendly to the crowd attuned to the format of the TV show "Amazing Race"]