UFC Dir of Digital & Social Media Shanda Maloney (@UFC_Shanda) has been with the MMA outfit for six years, and during that time has seen how the evolution of social platforms have opened new possibilities. The same can be said following last week’s announcement that a group led by WME-IMG has bought UFC. “For me right now, everything is business as usual,” Maloney said. “Now that WME-IMG is the parent owner of the business, I’ve actually had some of the other brands under the umbrella reach out to me wanting to know more about what I’m doing on social. If anything, it looks like I might be educating some of the other brands more than anything changes on my end at this point.” She added, “Now with this WME umbrella, we’ll be able to do a lot more with PBR, for example. It just gives us a little more opportunity and leverage to work with more brands and leagues and celebrities and athletes.”
Changes to the position over six years:
There are new social platforms that roll out pretty regularly. In addition to keeping up with the changes on Facebook and Twitter, you need to keep up with new platforms and figure out if those are the right place for us to be. When you look back at it, three years ago, many of these platforms didn’t exist.
Concerns over video streaming platforms:
We definitely have to keep an eye on those technologies. Our content is pirated pretty regularly. We have a piracy team that keeps up with that, and we work with Periscope and Facebook Live to do pretty quick and immediate takedowns of anybody who is illegally streaming our content. But we don’t want to abandon these platforms. We find some really cool and unique ways to use the technologies. For example, with Periscope, when they integrated their technology with GoPro, we took the opportunity to mount a GoPro to an athlete's striking coach. So you get a really cool (point-of-view) stream. But we do have an internal agreement that we won’t stream anything the day of the live event, because we don’t want to drive a lot of the traffic to another platform.
Social media approach for a PPV compared to any other week:
We don’t really get to take the foot off the gas for any particular event, whether it be UFC 200 or a regional event in Sioux Falls. We have boots on the ground for every event. We have someone representing our team from when the fighter checks in on Tuesday afternoon all the way through Sunday. There is someone on the ground getting behind-the-scenes content, someone live Tweeting the event and Snappy TV highlights. Some events may have a bigger budget where we can do some cool activations or working with Twitter to get custom emojis.
Most popular types of posts:
Fans really enjoy the GIF attempts that we have been putting together, like highlights of knockouts. We like to maintain a fun personality and banter with our fans. We had an instance where a fighter tweeted and complained that we hadn’t wished him a happy birthday after we wished another fighter a happy birthday. He tried to call us out on it. I actually found the tweet where we did wish him a happy birthday, and told him we were waiting for 91 days, 12 hours and 17 minutes to do it again. He responded, “This is why I love the UFC social team. They will call me out and have fun with it.”
Relationship between UFC and fighters’ social accounts:
The fighters lean on us quite a bit, including education about social media. Our athletes want to share more content about their events. We typically haven’t produced content for them specifically. That’s something I’ve worked on with our creative team. When a fight is about to get announced, we’ll have creative for the two fighters. We’ll give it to them and you’ll notice a lot of times they use it as their cover photo. They post it on their social accounts, which helps us promote ticket sales. We also work with them through direct message and let them know we just put out a promo they can retweet. They can come to us if they are locked out of their account or if they don’t know what to post or need some ideas.
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