Snapchat can increase real-time engagement with your soccer tournament by tapping into the real-time energy and your teams’ FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) Despite its beginnings as a teen-aged peer-to-peer network for questionable photos that would “disappear” after being viewed once, it has matured into a solid platform for showcasing a soccer tournament.

You access Snapchat exclusively through the mobile app, available on iOS and Android. Once you download the app, the interface can be confusing and unfamiliar, but this is by design. The kids don’t want the olds to be able to use it easily and intuitively. But once you figure it out, you’ll be snapping like a pro. Fortunately, Snapchat has a pretty detailed user guide. We’ll run down the basics for you to get you up and running.

The basics

Let’s get you up and running. There is really no prep work needed for Snapchat as it assumes you will be using stuff that is happening now in front and behind you. The only think you will need is a unique email address for the tournament that you are not using for any of your personal Snapchat profiles.

1. Download the app and launch it.
2. Press the Sign Up bar at the bottom
3. Fill in your user name (it will tell you if your choice has already been taken) your email address and a birth date. (you must be over 13)
4. Read and agree to the privacy policy (you can’t really opt out or change things…)
5. And you are now ready to send your first “snap.”

You can — and should — always add your snaps to your story and send them to your phone for archiving, but it is important to know that snaps disappear after being viewed. You should strive to create each snap as a self-contained mini story that has no history or future. Eventually, your continued snapping will build a story, but each user can and will dip in and out of your stream at will. Remember that and build around it.

Lurk a little

Before you begin to send out snaps, it is best to start following some people first and get to know their style, what they snap, their voice, etc. Here are some snap codes for some snapchatters we think are using the medium effectively. (some language, just so you are aware… this is all real and raw. Also, if you are having issues isolating the snapcode, just click on it and it will pop up by itself.)

You can also follow tourneycentral on snapchat, but we will probably just be snapchatting you using snapchat! If we see you follow us, we will follow back.

1. To add a snapchatter by snapcode:
This page on snapchat.com shows you how to add by snapcode. Basically, login, point your camera at the snapcode and hold down on the screen.

2. Watch the snapchatters for a few days to get a sense of their style, what you like and what you think you can adapt to your tournament event. You access their snaps by pressing on the purple square at the lower right corner of your login screen. If there are no snaps, you will see a “hamburger menu” with three lines.

Are you getting the hang of the interface? It is a bit different — as a reminder, this is by design to frustrate older folks away from the app — but press on and the connection with your tournament audience will be incredible.

As you watch the snapchatters above, you will see they use filters and geofilters (location/event overlays) video, slo-mo, reverse video, text and drawn overlays. When you find yourself asking, “Hey, how did they do that?” navigate over to this page on snapchat.com and find out.

3. Get brave and start looking for folks who snapchat soccer and start adding them. Be sure to read our guide about building out your social media networks.

4. Publish your snapcode in a news item on the front page or as a sponsor on the sponsor page.

What to snapchat

By now, you should be ready to just dig in and start snapping. What to snap, what to snap?

1. Your snaps are a part of your tournament event and must be consistent with your brand. Will you use just one spokesperson on snapchat or will there be a team? Will you “tag team” the snaps or have pre-planned programming hours where one person hosts a block of time? Will you invite guest teams to be “interviewed” on snapchat? There are no right answers, but you should think about this ahead of time.

2. Don’t be too programmed. Nobody likes being marketed to, especially on snapchat. If your audience senses you are “playing to a script,” they will drop you quickly. Just be yourself — or at least the self that is the tournament brand.

3. Design a day. Tell mini-stories about your tournament as the day progresses, before during and after the tournament. Show what is it like to organize the paperwork for registration, schedule games and referees. Take snapchat out to the fields on prep day and show the field lining, the nets going up. Interview the volunteers. Have a sneak peek at the tshirts at the HQ tent. Show the picking process for the shirt pre-orders, the late-night pizza for the hard-working volunteers.

4. Show the activity behind the scenes. Your guest teams want to be invested in your success as a shared experience. Give them that, let them in on the know.

5. Invite your advertisers, vendors and sponsors to run a promotion on your snapchat stream. It could be as simple as producing a short video in real time with the vendor of a popcorn stand at the venue saying “Stop at the Kettle Korn stand at Grantham Park, show us the next snap with the promo code and get $1.00 off” then create a photo snap of the vendor’s logo from their booth with the promo code handwritten across it.

6. But mostly, have fun!

This is an excellent article about being a brand on Snapchat by Frankie Greek.

Paul Smalera (@smalera) — formerly with the New York Times, now the Ideas Editor with Quartz — tweeted this out last year and it stuck with me.

Also, I’m not downloading an app for every credit card, car rental company and airline I use. Someone has to fix this.

— Paul Smalera (@smalera) November 11, 2014

In many ways, it reflects life on the ground with soccer tournament players and their families that supports the behavior patterns we have been seeing here at TourneyCentral.

As I stated in an earlier post, while you and your crew live and breathe your soccer tournament 24/7/365, teams and players don’t really care about your event except for the three games they’ll play — four or five if they get lucky and advance out of their group. They care about getting the schedule on time, finding food nearby and they really do care about getting the score correct. But not much else.

It’s a phenomenon we here refer to as the “90:00 minute attention span.”

They won’t download your app because they don’t want 5+ apps on their smartphones, one for each of the soccer tournaments they will be playing in this season, each with different features in different places, implemented differently. Instead, they will be using their own Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and other social apps to document their tournament experience.

Is it fair? Probably not. It would make your job easier if everyone was on your app. But they don’t care about your job; they care about their lives and your event is just a 90:00 minute sliver in that life.

Our Advice: Instead of imposing your app on your teams, find out how they want to receive your information. Is it through twitter? facebook? email? messaging? all of the above? Do that. While you are tuned into their needs, tune into their accounts (not in a creepy, stalking way; but a more connected way.) Notice they took a really cool photo and ask if you can share it through your channels. (Make sure you get parental permission first)

Do some special live broadcast with Periscope and ask them to hashtag their Instagram and twitter messages with your tournament hashtag. Show some love by liking and commenting.

Teams are also probably more likely to connect with your tournament from their own accounts they are comfortable with as they can control whether or not you can send them notifications. When they are playing in your event, they can turn notifications from you on by following. When they are done, they can unfollow (or keep following but turn notifications from you off.) They are in control and don’t have to trust you with their data or access.

If the goal of your app is to connect with your teams and squeeze one more minute of attention from them, ditch the app and focus on your teams’ networks. That is where they live.

Looking to get started with social media for your soccer tournament? We wrote the book.

Shortly after publishing the post on Meerkat, twitter released its own video-streaming app called Periscope. Since the two tools are so familiar, we’re just republishing our blog post, replacing Meerkat with Periscope. You decide which you want to use.

A couple months ago, a state soccer association asked how they might live-stream video from the site as the soccer games were being played at their tournaments. While possible, the costs to pull that off were over whelming.

Not so any more.

Hot on the heels of Meerkat, Periscope has been taking the Internet by storm, even being used by broadcast and cable TV to provide some behind-the-scenes look at how TV news comes together.

What is Periscope?
Periscope is an iPhone App (Android coming out soon hopefully) that turns any iPhone into a broadcast video camera. Basically, you download the app, log in with your twitter account and press the stream button. You can also get fancy and put in a title for your streaming session or enter a delay time to start counting down when your session will begin. When your twitter followers have also downloaded the stream and turned on notifications, they will get a notification that you are either live or you have set a delayed stream. They then click on the link in your twitter timeline to start watching whatever you are pointing your camera phone to.

There are other features like flipping the cameras around to point toward you, a chat button that functions like twitter as well as a “hearts” button. Once you are done streaming, you can save your stream to your camera or just let it disappear, much like Snapchat. It gets saved to the twitter servers for 24 hours and then disappears.

Our advice
Firstly, build out your networks. Since Periscope relies on a strong twitter network, you should focus on there. Running up to your tournament, set up some behind-the-scenes meerkat sessions such as a welcome message from the tournament director or a Q&A session where you encourage questions be submitted live via meerkat.

Visit an advertiser/sponsor and periscope the experience. Ask the owner/manager to invite the teams or welcome them. Do this before, during and after the tournament.

Invite parents to live-cast the games during the entire weekend. Post a large banner with the periscope logo and a white space where anyone willing to live-cast can put their twitter handle so fans and players can connect and watch each others’ periscope. Convert this into a front page, sticky story so people can find and follow the live video streams from your tournament.

Assign someone from your tournament to be the official periscope stream from the tournament. Video games, the HQ, interview vendors, show the action, show the fun. Show the teams that decided to go to another tournament instead of yours how much fun they are missing!

I’m sure there are all sorts of other ways you can use periscope for your event. Feel free to share them with us and we’ll post your creativity right here.