Procedures.
NSOs should develop guidelines around when, where and how they respond to conversations, enquiries and/or inappropriate content on each of their social media profiles.
However, it’s just as important that you also have systems and tools in place that allow you to monitor any conversations happening on social media that mention your NSO or other aspects of your sport that you would like to be aware of or engage in discussions about, regardless of where they happen online.
This could include cross-platform keyword alerts, following hashtags or monitoring platform-specific notifications from each of the social media platforms where your NSO has a presence.
Monitoring beyond just your own social media presence is especially important, as not all conversations about your NSO or sport happen on your social media profiles and therefore without tools in place to alert you of these conversations, it is often difficult to be aware of them in a timely manner.
Joining in conversations on social media (external to your own profiles) can also help boost brand awareness and credibility, as well as expose the NSO to new and relevant audiences.
Conversations on social media can escalate quickly, so it’s important that the NSO has at least one person responsible for monitoring any alerts and have processes in place for escalating any potential issues as soon as possible once they are identified. Developing a procedure and assigning the responsibility for monitoring social media out of hours is also an important consideration.
Monitoring your NSOs' social media is also important from a compliance perspective. Just like with any other form of public communication, there are various legal issues that can arise from the use of social media: where social media use is part of an NSO employees' job description, workplace health and safety obligations will be owed to those individuals in the same manner as any other task they are required to perform; there are also defamation laws that apply to content posted on social media, which may extend to the administrator of a social media page for third-party content; and privacy and data protection laws may also apply to content posted by the NSO.