Can a Social Media strategy work by itself? Or better: should a Sport Organisation focus just on Social Media?
My personal opinion is no.

Considering the European scenario and the needs of Sport Organisations there, social networks would touch only one of the many aspects that should be worked on.
A much wider and comprehensive strategy is needed in order to translate traffic into monetisation, a strategy which takes care of both areas: Audience AND Monetisation.

Social Media can help in widening the audience and improving its quality in terms on engagement and interaction BUT Monetisation is another story.

To make online marketing efforts really successful we need data, we need to know who our users are in order to target them with specific initiatives, competitions, offers, content. You can’t do that in the long term via Facebook or Twitter: you can, with one off instance, but then?

Ever tried to post on Twitter only to find out that is was down? Do you really want to exclusively give up your relationship with your fans to external entities? What if one day you’ll wake up finding out that Facebook has changed its policy and you cannot interact with your fans in the way you used to?

Social Networks are incredibly powerful tools that need to work together with your web/mobile based applications, which need to be the core of your online strategy.

Strategy, strategy, strategy!