Young Sail Trainers' Session on Social Media

Social media networking sites are the way forward to attract and interest more young people. This was the main message to come from this session. It featured young sail trainers giving their views on how social media sites work and why they are popular. Social media sites provide the framework young people use to exchange information with each other, effectively acting as a 'word of mouth' tool and therefore a great way to attract more young people to sail training voyages.

Facebook is the biggest and most used of all the social media sites but others include Myspace, Twitter and individual blogs. In addition, bookmarking websites such as Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon, and multimedia sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, are also popular.
The challenge for most sail training operators is the time needed to keep their Facebook pages and Twitter sites updated sufficiently to let people know you are serious and a site worth visiting. It was better not to have a Facebook site than not to allocate sufficient time to keep it updated and fresh. To be effective, these sites must have plenty of 'wow' factors, including images, films and anything else to keep the information current and worthy of clicking onto - the 'clickability' of your site.
While much of a Facebook site can be controlled, it was noted that once young people start linking to your site and adding information of their own, a degree of ownership is lost. Some delegates voiced a concern about the appropriateness of some images being put up and their lack of control, but the advice from the younger delegates was to accept that not everything can or and should be controlled.

Those attending the session divided into smaller groups in order to discuss what things organisations do right, what they should be doing and reasons why they are not. While many sail training operators have Facebook sites it was noted that very few, if any, sail training associations have sites. Sail Training International was urged to have a Facebook site that links to all the ships' Facebook sites at the very least. It was also encouraged to provide basic information that could be used by organisations on how to set up a Facebook site and what is required.
A key problem most operators saw with Facebook sites was the time it took them to update, and the cost. Updating Facebook sites while at sea was prohibitively costly and many did not have the manpower.

Among the suggestions was to use Facebook advertising, a tool available at a small cost that enabled organisations to find the demographic of their trainees and post adverts on their sites. Google was also seen as a possible option for advertising but a lot of research was needed to ensure it was marketed in the right direction.

It was recognised that most organisations do not have first hand knowledge of Facebook and other social media sites so it was suggested that they should bring in young people as volunteers so they can use their knowledge and enthusiasm while offering work experience at the same time.