Is your club on Social Media?

As social media becomes an increasingly important way of communicating, and getting information to a wider audience, let's work together to increase the presence of bridge on facebook and twitter*. This not only shares the news amongst our bridge playing friends, but also gets more exposure for bridge amongst those who may be less familiar with the game - we may just get one or two new players from it.

You can also follow us - @ebuaylesbury

Twitter

Similarly please promote our twitter handle to your members.

We also have icons on our homepage which allow you to tweet news from our website with a single click - you'll see those if you look at www.ebu.co.uk.

Is your club on Twitter? If so please let us know as we are keen to help spread information about your activities so we will follow you and try to retweet you when appropriate.

Adding twitter buttons to your website

If you want to provide a button so that members can share a page of your website on twitter with a single click, then do the following:

1. Go to https://about.twitter.com/resources/buttons#tweet
2. Input the relevant information about the page they will be sharing - the url, the 'title' of the page, etc
3. Copy the code which is automatically generated in the grey box on the right of the page
4. Add the code to the html source for your page at the point in the page where you want the button to appear. If you are using bridgewebs then you will need to use the 'source' tab on the page editor.
5. If the point in the html code where you want to add the button isn't obvious then one way to locate it is to revert to the WYSIWYG ('what you see is what you get' - pronounced wizzy-wig) version of the editor. Write a unique word which wouldn't otherwise be on the page (e.g. 'hedgehog', 'blancmange') in the place where you want the icon to be, and then return to the source code. Then search in the code for the word you typed (pressing ctrl+f usually gives a search facility) and replace the word you typed with the code of the button.
6. When you save the page you should have a 'tweet' button for your members to use.
7. If you wish to add a button to another page then simply repeat the process. The majority of the code will remain unchanged - just the title and weblink will change - so if you are comfortable editing html then you may wish to simply alter the original code, rather than going to twitter's code generator each time.

If you want to provide a button on your website so that members can follow your twitter account via single click, then follow these steps:

1. Go to https://about.twitter.com/resources/buttons#follow
2. Put in your Twitter handle.
3. Copy the code which is automatically generated in the grey box on the right of the page
4. Add the code to the html source for your page.
5. When you save the page you should have a 'follow' button for your members to use.

Facebook

Do not confuse this page with the Aylesbury Staff's facebook account. Although it is 'friends' with a number of players that page is used for only administrative purposes, and is not a source of information for the EBU.

If your club has a facebook page, let us know. We can then 'like' your page, and what you post will appear on our timeline. We can then more easily share via our facebook page things you are doing at your club which would be interesting to a wider audience.

Adding facebook buttons to your website

If you want to provide a button so that members can like a page of your website on facebook with a single click, then please follow the instructions in this document (as it contains html code it cannot accurately be displayed on this page).

If you want to encourage people to 'like' your club's facebook page then the simplest thing is often to provide a link to the appropriate page - if they are familiar with facebook they should know where to find the 'like' button once they have reached your page.

*-What if we don't use social media?

Secondly, the above question has a follow up question from us - who do you mean by 'we'?

If there is not a single member of the club who uses social media then this will be of no interest to your members, and you can disregard all of this. It is extremely unlikely, however, that this is the case. A recent survey found that around 70% of the population regularly use social media, and that includes over a third of those aged over 65. So you will likely have some social media users amongst your membership, even if you aren't aware of them.

What is more likely is that your club does not use it, or perhaps the club officials don't use it. But there are still things you can do to provide a service to your members, as this will not only help them, but also help you:

• Make them aware of the social media platforms that the EBU uses.
• Add the 'tweet' and 'like' buttons to your website. The club may not use social media, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't benefit from the exposure that comes from its news/results/picture/etc being shared on social media
• Consider whether there may be a member who is social-media-savvy who could take on the role of running your social media accounts.

For those clubs who do not have social media accounts we will in future try to put together a beginners, step-by-step guide to setting up a social media presence from scratch. Look out for that in a future issue of Club Management Focus.

In the meantime, if we can help, or if you want to send us you twitter handles or links to your facebook pages, then please write to peter.stockdale@ebu.co.uk