For Hopscotch Customer Success Manager Neil Horowitz (@NJH287), engagement comes with the territory. With the company builiding mobile platforms for teams, venues and events, an emphasis on engagement makes sense. But Horowitz believes reaching an audience is not as simple as a hello. He said, “When you talk about engagement and you are equating it to someone sharing something on Facebook, retweeting or someone double tapping on Instagram, it completely dilutes the metrics and the removes all significance and meaning.”
Showing clients success:
They love that they actually see the data behind their social. That goes from website referrals to ticket purchases to reach and engagement. It’s about celebrating those successes and setting yourself up for those successes by looking at what works and what doesn’t work and ultimately tying it in to bottom-line objectives.
An overrated metric:
The idea of Facebook’s growing dominance of video views. Yes, it is certainly growing. But Facebook counts a video view as an autoplay for three seconds, and you hear about that from execs, teams and even sponsors who are paying for this stuff. That’s what they really care about, unfortunately. It’s going to come to a head at some point and these video views are really going to be similar to ad visibility.
Keys to monetizing on social media:
Where advertising is going is more engagement and content marketing. It is really getting to where you cannot tell if it's an ad or not. So if you have engaged fans, how can we monetize these fans through direct sales or integrating a sponsor? Sponsors don’t want to be disruptive. You want to integrate it to the content you already know is working. Sponsors are footing the bill for content, activations, special deals that are value add for the fans. It’s when you can organically and relevantly insert the sponsor.
Biggest challenge facing brands on social media:
It's becoming pay to play. A lot of brands have been slow to realize that. They got so accustomed to the free organic reach early on that now they don’t feel like it should be a budget line item. Yes, it’s pay to play now, but you are paying for results. You spent all that time reaching the right fans, attracting the right fans, the ones that are hot leads and want to engage with your product. Now you have everyone in the store and it’s just a matter of getting them to spend money with you.
How social media has changed sports business:
It’s allowed all that content to be able to flow into one place. For the first time in a long time, teams and fans aren’t reliant on traditional media channels to get the word out, to connect directly.
If you know anyone who should be featured for their use of social media, send their name to us at
jperez@sportsbusinessdaily.com
