As a club administrator, you know your club should be on social media. But which channels should you be using, and what should you be posting? Below we'll go through 12 examples of what clubs are posting on their socials on a regular, often weekly basis.

This article focuses mostly on Facebook and Instagram as, Facebook (1st) and Instagram (4th) are still the most popular channels according to Social Media News. YouTube (2nd) and WhatsApp (3rd) round out the top 4. Whilst Millennials, Gen Z and Alphas all talk about Snapchat and TikTok, they come in at 6th and 13th respectively behind LinkedIn (5th), whilst Twitter sits in 8th.

So before you dive in an post across every channel, give some consideration to: why your club is on social media; namely who your audience is; what your goals are; then how you’ll best achieve your goals based on the resources you have available.

The good thing is, no matter how small your club, there is likely at least one person (one of those Millennials or Gen Zers above) within your committee or playing ranks that knows social media inside out and is therefore capable of creating and posting for your club on a consistent basis.

There are also a host of free & cheap tools such as Canva to help you with templates for most of the examples you'll see below.

Despite many of these posts having nicely crafted artwork on templates etc, you can still achieve plenty of impact by posting a simple photo or video, then letting the post copy do the heavy lifting in terms of the match info, team list etc.

By committing to create a regular weekly post such as these, you’re also creating an opportunity for sponsors. Either an opportunity for your existing team or club sponsors to gain additional reach, or even an additional property to sell to new or existing sponsors as an additional benefit. Consider having a sponsor for each of these as a presenting partner e.g. Team of the Week presented by Sponsor X. That could be 10-20 weeks that the sponsor gets branding plus a tag/mention, in return for a voucher/prize for recipients or even additional cash for your club coffers. With that cash you may then be able to afford to pay someone within your club to produce the content, rather than relying on volunteers who may not have enough time to do all this consistently.

With a quick round of photos taken at training or a match in one day, along with a simple interview or questionnaire, you could have dozens of posts ready made to be scheduled for posting every couple of days among your other posts. Through Facebook’s own Business Manager or Creator Studio tools, or 3rd party tools like Hootsuite, Social Pilot, Buffer, or Sprout Social to name a few, you can easily batch schedule months worth of posts in under an hour.

Why should players get all the attention? Recognising your volunteers or long term members & supporters is a great way to build loyalty within your club. Coaches, managers, committee members, first-aid, ground marshalls, canteen staff…the list goes on. Like the Player Profiles above, these can be created and scheduled in batches meaning you only have to do it once and then it is done for the season.

Rugby SA Facebook | Rugby SA Instagram

Barossa Rams Facebook | Barossa Rams Instagram  

Whilst this info is readily available in Rugby Xplorer on a team by team basis, this gives your players and supporters an opportunity to see the a snapshot of all your club's home and away matches each week. Plus a good way to promote special events around your match day, and plug those sponsors. 

Many competitions require you to submit this before game day anyway, so just take it one step further and publish on your socials to highlight key players, sponsors and more.

Referee appointments - the referees’ equivalent of a team list. Good to  see DDRRA and many other associations using images to recognise the appointed referees each week.  

Here are some different approaches. Some involve graphic design, others just require one or more photos or videos from the day’s matches. Either way this is a great way to mention and tag sponsors which can help increase your reach through shares.

This could be tied in briefly with Match Results above, or you could write a more comprehensive article as a post or website article, or even record a video interview after the game. Here are a couple of examples:

A picture tells a thousand words and posting match photos or videos of moments like run-on, or the team song is a relatively easy way to keep feeding your social media channels. These examples take it one step further with a consistent format that adds a bit of fun, creates anticipation and fosters engagement.

Tuesday 10

Six of the Best: The Oysters Half Dozen. In all our research, these guys are truly one of our favourites. So many puns! Beyond the puns, they really do social well so it’s worth a scroll if you have five minutes.

Action shot of the week - incorporates a sponsor plus incentives (prizes) for people to take and submit photos for the club.

Plenty of matches are now live streamed through the likes of Cluch TV. These platforms can extract highlights packages for you to easily share through your own channels. Or it can be as simple as footage from someone’s phone on the sideline.

Meat Pie of the Week - Subbies, Four’N Twenty Pies and NSW Rugby TV award a “Meat Pie” of the Week, after receiving nominations by 5pm each Monday. Subbies Rugby publishes these video clips as reels on both Facebook and Instagram weekly during the season  

The examples below appear to recognise on-field effort or performance, which is great! Additionally, this could be a way to recognise and reward good behaviour, teamwork or improvement at training, or just a player that has something good around the club in line with rugby’s values. This could be particularly effective in junior clubs as a way to reinforce those values that make rugby, and your club environment, truly unique. Or perhaps you could do both each e.g. Player of the Week, Club Person of the Week etc.

There are two approaches to this. Either recognise a particular grade or age group that has done particularly well, or select a virtual team made up of players from all grades or age groups within your club that deserve recognition for their individual efforts. In the latter, you could have juniors mixed with seniors, 4th graders & colts mixed with 1st graders, and so on.

Rugby Xplorer has some handy reports that are easily accessible via Admin Portal > Competition Management > Reports that are availble withn your club or competition. The examples below are competition-wide, but why not publish this each week within your club, especially if you field multiple grades.

This might not be something that happens every week within your club, or maybe it does if you consider all these things below. Either way it is definitely something worth monitoring and recognising whenever it happens. Rugby Xplorer has readily available reports to help you monitor this 

• Club debut
• Welcome to new players 
• 50/100/200 etc club games
• 1st grade debut
• 50/100/200 etc 1st grade games
• 5/10 seasons (if your record keeping isn’t exact on number of games played) but especially if you have juniors playing from U6 to U18s these milestones are bound to occur

Here some examples: