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Social Studies: Rams Digital Media Manager Nate Bain On Relocating, Balancing Content

Rams Digital Media Manager Nate Bain (@natebain) enters his third season with the franchise, and it has been an eventful tenure. In his first year, the speculation of a move to L.A. began to gain steam, and in his second, the franchise made its relocation official. Bain said of his role during training camp and the preseason: "I see our guys every single day, we have meals together. If there’s fun content that we want to get of the guys who are playing video games or playing horse on the basketball court, it’s easy to go out and talk to them, get that content, get those interviews. For me, the move has brought us together." As for the impact of the move on the team's social media presence, Bain said of the social media impact of being in L.A., "We have celebrities at practice, at games; our reach and engagement has grown ten-fold overnight."

SOCIAL SNAPSHOT

Must-follow: “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” is one I follow and enjoy from live tweeting to recapping content.
Favorite app: Since moving to L.A., Waze has been a life saver.
Average time per day on social media: Too much, but it comes with the territory.

Experiencing relocation through social media:
The league wants to make it a year-round sport, but in the offseason, sometimes players aren’t around and teams are pulling for things to engage fans. So from a content perspective, the move has been great for us. We constantly have fresh new content and video of packing up and unloading, reactions from guys and this and that. The move in itself was like having divorced parents; you have two fan bases that passionately love the team. It was a delicate balance -- how do we cover this and be excited, but also how do we be respectful to an entire fan base that we are leaving.

Balancing content for L.A. and St. Louis fans:
It’s been uncharted territory, for sure. But it’s been a good experience. It’s nice to get back to football. During the offseason, we’ve had a lot of great content, but we also had a lot of bickering back and forth. I like to leave our social channels open; I don’t like to censor anyone. It will balance itself out. We don’t ignore that past, but we are coming to L.A. where everyone is excited.

Rules regarding “Hard Knocks” posts:
There were a couple of times when HBO came in somewhere and I left it alone to happen on TV. But I’ve took behind-the-scenes photos and held them off social media until a certain episode aired. But “Hard Knocks” helped us hit a whole new audience and gave us content when other teams were going through normal parts of training camp.

Rams fans’ favorite types of posts
:
The pop culture/celebrity posts -- whether that’s GIFs of popular programs or we having rapper Kendrick Lamar at practice -- turned out to be the heaviest traffic days. Right behind those would be posts embracing L.A. and the culture of the city, followed by posts of football highlights.

Future of social media:
Apps are wanting you to stay on as long as possible. That’s why you see a push for native video on Facebook and Twitter. That's reflected in an increase in our mobile traffic and a slight decline in our overall web traffic. If we send out a link to a video on our website and also put it on Facebook, we are getting significantly better metrics and analytics through Facebook and Twitter than we are through our site. So the questions becomes, "How do you maintain the importance to the website and drive people there while also growing social and capitalizing on all the new algorithms and technology that these platforms put out."

If you know anyone who should be featured for their use of social media, send their name to us at jperez@sportsbusinessdaily.com.

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