Tag: Facebook

A Primer Part 2: Social Inbound Marketing

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A Primer Part 1: What is Social Media

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Social Media and Sports- a Winning team

The idea of leveraging social media in sports has been around for a while now, as teams and individuals use various platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to engage with fans. Its a great combination for both as social media thrives on sources that provide engaging content, and sports teams build and succeed financially on engaging fans. The direct nature and immediacy of twitter has made it a particular favorite for athletes to use, and with significant success. Athletes such as Danica Patrick are now being paid to twitter (in this case by Tissot), and others such as Shaquille O’Neal, Lance Armstrong, Mark Sanchez, Lamar Odom, Derek Fisher, and Dwight Howard are all attracting large numbers of subscribers.

Sports Illustrated ran a piece recently highlighting the growing importance of social media in the industry and the widening use of Twitter by the leagues

“The tool is scoring for the pro leagues too. All the majors — the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR — shoot their followers useful information like scores, schedules, and highlight clips” Mainstream indeed.

For those facing the challenge if getting started in Social Media, here are a few of the key reasons why you, your team, or your sponsors should invest the time to get involved, and build a strategy to stay involved.

1. Your fans want to be in touch with you. These systems allow you to engage and provide customer service that is personal, and yet also manageable.
2. Fans like to have news from a vareity of sources, but some news is best coming direct from you. You have authority and only sometimes choice of when to issues the news. Use those advantages.
3. Sponsors keep many athlets and sports running. They give based on what they get. Social media gives you a chance to bring them in to conversation, thank them and send your fans their way.
4. Your fans are a great source of ideas and solutions. They are thrilled to be involved so, so asking questions is a great way to engage and costs little.
5. They are talking about you already. Some good, some bad. Either way, you can only influence the outcome if you are in the conversation
6. Its not just a scoreboard, you can put rich content and bring in people that might not like your “official sites”.
7. You can always send people back to the official sites. It will bring in new fans and add to traffic, rarely does more contejnt of interest reduce your influence.
8. Finally, you can actually see what is happening. Official sites will appeal to a part of your fan base, but not all. By engaging in social media conversations, you get in on a broader and much bigger set of conversations. By engaging social media business intelligence services, you can hear and see what is being said and use this feedback to assess you success relative to targets.

Its important to also get involved before you need to. If you have been an influential part of the community by creating great content and commenting on other peoples ideas and issues, highlighting ideas, events, dealing with issues or celebrating, it is not self serving as a simple marketing piece, and is infinately more effective.