Many clubs and organisations struggle to develop their voice and reason for being on social media channels sometimes.  It can be a case of joining up because everyone else is and then trying to play catch up in getting a grasp of it.

Others will get a grip of it quickly and develop their reasons, often something that is worked out by speaking to different departments to gain consensus.  Ultimately the marketing or comms departments will take charge and run it.

We are seeing now more having a clear goal as to why they are there, and that sometimes is half the battle.  Know the ‘why’ and the rest will fall into place much easier.  Tottenham have certainly become one of these clubs and recently published these reasons so that fans know where they stand.

Firstly they published ‘How we are going to use Twitter this season‘ in mid-September.  They come across as wanting to be open and honest about their aims and answered some of the more common questions.  A couple of examples are;

Q: Why is the Club on Twitter?
We see Twitter as a great way of engaging with our fans in order to help bring you closer to the Club and to make sure you hear the official news from the Club first. We want to build the biggest community of Spurs fans on Twitter, so please get your friends to follow@SpursOfficial too!

Q: Who Tweets as @SpursOfficial? 
Our communications team helps manage the feed and our Social Media Manager oversees the way we use the channel, working with other areas of the Club to bring you up-to-date news from players, fixture, updates from the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation and our charity campaigns.

This month they have included their Facebook reasons in another post, called ‘How we use Facebook‘.  Again this has come from a mixture of questions that been asked regularly and others they want to inform fans about.  A couple of nice snippets are;

Q: Why don’t you ban the trolls and fans of other clubs from our Facebook page?
It is hard to know when fans join our page if they are genuine Spurs supporters or from other clubs. The best way to stop the trolling on our page is either to report the post to Facebook or to ignore it. We want to make our Facebook page the most welcoming page for Spurs fans and we need your help to make sure it is!
 
Q: Why don’t you comment on transfer speculation?
Our Facebook page is the place to go to get the facts first. We will bring you all the up-to-date news as soon as we have it, so make sure you like our posts in order to see all of our latest news.

They aren’t the first to add some context as to their offering on social media platforms.  To the average fan they may not have come across Twitter or may not know how to use it very well.  By giving fans a reason and some help then they can move fans who are digitally active onto their social platforms.

Liverpool have an easy to find section which gives links to player and staff accounts.  Whilst Celtic FC have been advocates for a while and earlier this summer published a section on their Twitter feeds.  This is a club who have gone down a different route, and one I am a fan of, by separating the main sections of the club and developing their own accounts.

This will have come from gaging how much traffic and what different questions they get asked about the most.  They can then involve experts from those departments and ensure fans get answered quickly on their queries.  They have several accounts including;

• @CelticFC
• @CelticFCshop
• @CelticFCtickets
• @CFCcommercial

It’s a good move by clubs and brands to be open with what they are setting out to do and why they will be acting (or not) in certain ways when it comes to the questions and content.  By setting expectations then it will drive what content they produce and how useful it is to fans.

Well done to @RKTweets at Spurs, @PolishTurnstile at Celtic and all the other social media guys doing great jobs at their clubs around the UK.