It’s not often we get to talk on here about sports other than the big 3 (football, rugby and cricket) and most of that tends to be around football.  So its nice to get to hear about a social media campaign by another sport, and one that others can take something from.

The sport is that of Netball.  Netball is played by some 7 million people worldwide, of which over 1 million are in the UK, each week.  It’s also a sport thats enjoying greater coverage than it has for a long while with the SkySports deal to cover the recently formed Netball Superleague.

Over the last 3 years, netball has exploded on twitter, with teams taking to the social media platform to interact with fans and promote upcoming games.

But despite the high participation rates there is little in the way of mainstream media coverage outside of the Sky deal, of professional netball – so teams are taking to social media to get themselves heard instead.

Surrey Storm are the leading franchise on social media, with a good following on both Twitter and Facebook.  The reasons for the Storm’s development in the social space is clear to their Marketing & Communications Manager, Matt Burton;

“We have taken inspiration from MCFC and the way they are interacting with fans via social media.

As most fans can’t get to away games we started to tweet live updates from games and it took off from there. Where BBC would provide similar updates for football etc via bbc.co.uk, there was nobody doing this for netball, so we started tweeting and fans loved it.

We now tweet live from all games, offering fans from across the globe the platform to follow Storm when games aren’t on TV.  We are also looking to develop our youtube strategy and this season have started to add pre and post match video interviews: http://www.youtube.com/user/SurreyStormNetball“

To take this a step further the club have launched a Twitter campaign ahead of this Satursday’s sold out clash with Loughborough Lightening.  They are offering the chance for a fan to win 2 tickets to the Fiat Netball Superleague match, and get to work with the Storm media team to tweet live updates through the game.  The winner will also get to meet the players on the night.  An amazing prize for a big fan!

To enter the competition, you need to follow @surreystorm and tweet them with your reason on why you should be the official Storm tweeter for the match and include #stormtwittercomp to be considered.

Entries are now open and the deadline for twitter entries is 11.59pm on Tuesday 24 January, so not much time left to enter!

This is a really nice initiative by the club, showing their willingness to give more than just a prize but an experience.  Many competitions we see are for a pair of tickets or kit but what many dont see is how much a fan wants to be involved with the club, to be part of it (even just for a little bit).  They’ve shown as well that they are willing to give some control away, let the fans be in charge. Too many are precious about who can say what where and dont concede anything, thus keeping fans at arms length.

Another good move from the club is to also have their players on social media, helping to spread the word about the club, the sport, upcoming fixtures and give an insight into who they are.  This has worked well in sports across the US and, if managed correctly, can be enormously beneficial to all involved (awareness, sponsorship, press coverage and much more).

We’ve seen the advent of Twitter influencers being given press access to games in the US and prizes such as ‘Facebook Row’ here in the UK.  Now it appears to be spreading.

For sports who dont get the attention that football, rugby and cricket get from the mainstream press, the need to look at alternatives and be opportunitistic is there.  We will see more clubs/sports become ‘media publishers’ as the realisation that they have so much content to give and the platforms to achieve this on are there now.

Well done to Surrey Storm and hopefully we’ll see more following in their footsteps this year.