Where are the media galleries?

On your social media accounts.

You just don’t need them because your audience no longer wants them on your site. They want photos and videos in their own social streams, which means photos and videos should now be living on your social accounts.

The website needs to give the who what where when why and be the authoritative voice for the your tournament; also, for operationally critical data (sponsors, applications, schedules.) The other media stuff needs to live on the outposts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope, Snapchat etc with the website simply validating the authenticity of the content. The outposts are where people live now, wanting your tournament to meld into the rest of their lives, not the other way around. 

Embed to your website, don’t upload.
Most social media accounts will enable you to embed your content into your web site. You can embed photos, videos, FB posts, etc onto your Front Page News and your About Page on your TourneyCentral website.

By embedding your content, you take advantage of being able to share your content across different social platforms as well as being able to edit the content from a single point, i.e., FB or Instagram. You will also see more traffic to your content because users will be able to more easily share with their social groups in the communities they already feel comfortable in, i.e., Facebook, twitter, YouTube, etc.

Since Facebook is the most popular social media platform, we’ll show you how to embed a post from your event page. Other platforms are similar, many actually easier because they make the embed choice more visible.

Embed judiciously.
Choose the content you want to embed carefully. Use embedding to highlight the event, not host a complete gallery onto your about page or front page news. You’ll find one or two carefully chosen photos or videos will go further than dozens of seemingly random photos and videos. Your pages will also load quicker if they are not hosting a lot of heavy graphics.

Watch the conflicts
When embedding content, make sure you do not provide conflicting information or alternative ways of “applying” to the event. For example, you may think embedding an event calendar post is helpful to a team applying, but they may think that by clicking “Yes, I’m attending” they have applied to your tournament. Think through how users will interact with your embedded content. It is best if you embed photos and videos and let the rest of your website handle the business part of your tournament. (When posting calendar events on your social outposts, please be clear about how a team applies. NEVER ASSUME they know what to do and how to do it.)

Starting up social for your soccer tournament
You may find these resource helpful for setting up and maintaining social media for your soccer tournament: