Sports are inherently social – a topic that has always brought people around the water cooler. It’s not a stretch to say sports are one of the most “social” topics. Almost everyone has some team, player or sport they support. And you share these bragging rights with friends/family/strangers/co-workers at bars, around the TV, on sports-talk radio, over the phone, at work, essentially everywhere. And now, increasingly across the social media world. Sports talk thrives across blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, websites –it’s ubiquitous.
The social web provides an unprecedented opportunity for sports marketers. Sports are going more social every day and why marketers need to take notice now. The market is moving fast and sports properties need to get in on the game and develop a long-term play. There is no better return on investment than to build your fan base than utilizing social media. Our individual passions for teams, players and leagues will create millions upon millions of social actions acting as megaphones to cost effectively build your awareness on the backs of your most passionate fans.
We wanted to see how the professional sports leagues were stacking up in the social arena. As covered in “USA Today”, our recent Social Share of Voice report shows the NBA dominating US professional sports leagues and is most likely attributable to being in season while scores, news and fan chatter is most active.
The NFL, NASCAR, The NHL and BMX round out the top five.
Vitrue SSV Report for Major Sports Leagues
The relatively high Vitrue SMI scores for the sports leagues are evidence that these conversations are thriving on line because sports are social by nature and very relevant to many. Social media has gone mainstream with 52 million users in the US alone on Facebook and over 175 million worldwide. So if you want to reach mass audiences you need to be where they are not only gravitating but where they are also spending unprecedented amounts of time.
One of the most immediate opportunities appears to be creating an official Facebook page for the NFL or MLB. The NBA dominates and with over 560,000 fans. In the last week alone (since Feb 24th) they have grown over 16,700 fans, an impressive 3% gain in one week.
The NBA will also be one of the first launch a new branded partner page on Facebook’s redesign to launch next week. The redesign will provide partners like the NBA a new interface to more actively engage its fans. So far the changes we know will require brands to take or active role in conversation. Facebook is providing better tools to its partners by giving brands the ability to look more like a consumer profile – so brands need to know how to join the conversation effectively. We applaud the NBA for being a trailblazer as they are getting social in a big way.
But why then is there relatively low adoption of other sports properties to embrace social media?
At a high level we have looked at the leagues but let’s look closer to see what sports teams are providing, as people are most passionate about the teams themselves. After all a consumer fanning a brand on Facebook is akin to wearing a team jersey and by “fanning” consumers are defining who they are.
We looked at a sample set of over 20 Facebook pages across multiple sports teams and a surprising few have a commanding presence.
We found one of the best examples to be Manchester United’s page with over 650,000 fans to be one of the best page examples and appears to be not even an official team page – just a very sophisticated fan as an admin. It provides a good combination interactive features and official pictures, videos, polls and RSS feeds, in-page applications and rich graphics. People want high quality content on line and don’t want to leave Facebook to find it. Additionally we found the Boston Celtics with over 209,000 providing official links and videos but needing to link in NBA’s page and also to moderate the content on their wall.
From our review we found most other pages to lack engaging graphical content and missing the opportunity to provide “official” high quality pictures and videos. A recent study found the top five reasons that young consumers gave for joining a brand or fan group were to “get news or product updates” (67%), “view promotions” (64%), “view or download music or videos” (41%), “submit opinions” (36%) and “connect with other customers” (33%) according to a new study from The Participatory Marketing Network and the Lubin School of Business’ Interactive and Direct Marketing Lab at Pace University.
Best practices for official sports-related pages should strive to incorporate high quality videos and photos, RSS feeds of team & player related news. Also utilizing events for – games, interviews and exclusive content releases would be effective but we found very few sports pages are currently doing this.
Why not set events and get people to take social actions and announce to their social circle? Include applications to give fans what they want like slide shows of amazing team photos, HD video player branded with the team’s logo so fans can share with their friends or give them trivia or polls to test their love. Engage me. Entertain me. Make me feel cool and want to share.
