Social media is so much more than just adding a “Like” button on the top of a Web page, yet for some brands this is what they consider as ticking the ‘social box’.

For Betfair, social and community is at the heart of our business; our proposition of punters betting with each other for bigger wins is synonymous with the new social landscape and so we have a duty as a company to ensure that we live and breathe social.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds when you consider that as a gambling company, Facebook (the biggest social network in the World with 700m users) isn’t entirely open to us, and anything we post on there has to be vetted and anything we build for it has to be pre-approved. Yet this shouldn’t and doesn’t stop us from starting to integrate social across all our marketing output and soon you will see some new marketing ideas and campaigns that have social at their very heart. Campaigns that are built around social rather than having social added on at the end with a like button or a ‘Follow us on Twitter’ moniker.

Betfair Poker has attracted over 10,000 followers

For marketers, social media offers an opportunity for brands to connect with audiences, to share content with them and to build relevance and we have started to execute on a social media marketing strategy that enables us to do just that. Despite Facebook being far from an open platform for us, we have an active Facebook community following us, we have been running dedicated Facebook promotions since last summer and thanks to a very close relationship with Facebook, we have achieved several social firsts that make Betfair a leader in the gambling industry for social media.  We  also have some very ambitious plans in the app space where we see a big opportunity to use the viral nature of Facebook to educate sports fans about elements of the exchange.

Yet it’s not all about Facebook. Whilst Facebook is a great platform for sharing promotions, content and building our follower-base; Twitter offers huge opportunities to not only engage people but also to stimulate betting activity. We have a loyal and dedicated following on Twitter numbering over 80,000 and we have several very active but very different accounts, which we know have a following across our customer base.

@BetfairFootball, soon to be relaunched @BetfairSports, has established a reputation for itself of being the home of in-play conversation and tips around all big football matches and live sporting events. The team are sharing insights into our betting markets, where the money is going based on the action on the pitch as well as seeking to educate the Twitterati as to the intricacies of the Exchange.

@Betfair is the voice of Betfair on Twitter and with a horse-racing focus, it highlights value-opportunities, promotions and information around our latest product launches. There are regional variations of @Betfair in several European countries, which have established themselves as the local voice of Betfair in each market.

@BetfairPoker, which I know divides opinions, started off as a social media experiment but now has an incredibly loyal, engaged and influential audience. It’s a completely off the wall comedy led feed, very loosely associated with poker. But it’s a great case-study in how to build engagement and has itself been a trending topic on Twitter several times. Recently to prove the worth of the platform, we have started to integrate characters from the feed within our Poker events and Product and have also run @BetfairPoker themed tournaments, which have had very good take-up, further proving that social interest can lead to actual activity.

As well as being a connector of people, social media is an enabler and we want to use social as a platform to showcase our value, to enable our customers to talk about and refer Betfair to their networks and to give them the tools to do this. Having a betting community is the key to our business and social marketing is a natural extension of this. The best social marketing campaigns are built around social and people – think Ikea- tag a product, KLM- Reward Flights and ‘The Best Job in the World’. With Betfair being a people-powered business, social offers us the perfect platform to do this.

We have made a good start at building up an engaged and relevant community and delivering value through the social platforms to them, but now we’re going to take this one step further and create marketing campaigns for our existing and prospective customers that are built around social and have a social first philosophy.

Only then will we be able to deliver on our promise of ‘truly doing social’.