Marc Brady moved from the private sector to start work as sport manager at the University of Wolverhampton in 2008. Early on he suggested that they should be using social media to increase participation in the university. He went to talk to the university marketing team to ask what guidelines he should be following. there weren’t any guidelines in place so he wrote his own.
His goal was to increase participation through social media, and to do this by spreading the sport’s centres profile and building a one-to-one relation with users.
They have 3 people in their team of 9 with roles in social media. Their work involves recording videos showing people how to use the equipment, deleting spam from the comments and replying to genuine comments really quickly. Marc says it is ‘vital that your facebook page is checked and updated on a regular basis.’
To check the impact of Facebook on participation he has tested putting some application forms only on Facebook page.
He uses the Facebook Insights tool to monitor the number of page views, comments and more. So far their Facebook pages has now got 450 likes, but many more visitors from interested people.