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Brand Engagement Summit

Social Media Playing Larger Role Than Ever In How Fans Consume Sports

MVPindex co-Founder & CMO Kyle Nelson kicked off a session on the evolution of social media in sports marketing by taking a look at activations by Nike, USAA and Bud Light during the '16 NFL season. Part two of the session featured one-on-one interviews with Twitter Global Head of Sports Content Partnerships Laura Froelich; Instagram Head of Global Sports Partnerships Brandon Gayle and Facebook Head of Sports Partnerships, Teams & Athletes Kevin Cote. Nelson said that Nike, USAA and Bud Light were three of 260 brands that activated in the NFL last season, combining for 12,700 posts, 34.1 million engagements and 3.7 billion impressions, which generated total brand value of $67.7M. Bud Light’s team-specific can campaign’s top activating team was the Raiders, followed by the Dolphins and Falcons. Nelson said that the four top teams generated 42% of the engagement for the league-wide campaign.

INDIVIDUAL BRANDS: Nelson said he considers Seahawks QB Russell Wilson and Patriots QB Tom Brady “great brand ambassadors.” The comparison between the two shows how Wilson generated value for Nike with a high volume of posts featuring the brand, while Brady made far fewer posts related to Under Armour during the '16 season. Wilson made 41 posts, which generated 1.2 million engagements, 68.1 million impressions and $1.5M in brand value for Nike. Brady’s four posts for UA generated 322,000 engagements, 15.8 million impressions and $353,000 in brand value.

QUICK HITS

* Froelich, on Twitter's live streaming: “Last quarter we streamed over 800 hours of content on our platform. This audience will be interested to know that 51% of that was sports content. We have a tremendous appetite for it on the platform. It’s also a super young audience. Seventy-five percent of the 45 million unique users who viewed those 800 hours of content are under the age of 35, and 55% are under 25.”

* On Nike’s Breaking2 campaign: “Nike has been working with athletes to try to break the two-hour marathon barrier. It would be a feat of tremendous proportions. They had an event that they livestreamed on Twitter a few weeks ago. It was just an opportunity for a huge community to congregate around watching these athletes be incredibly inspiring. … It was really a genius move on Nike’s part, because ultimately what we were really doing was watching a two-hour commercial for Nike.” She pointed out that the runner who nearly finished the race in early May in under two hours, Eliud Kipchoge, has since added 12,000 followers on Twitter.

* On the platform’s “While you were away” feature: “With hundreds of millions of Tweets being published every day, it’s impossible to see every single tweet that might be of interest to you. So what we’re doing now is, we’re able to surface content to you that, based on whom you follow and the kind of interactions that you have on Twitter, we’re learning what you might be interested in and we’re surfacing that to you when you come back to the app. … That has been really, really successful in terms of driving growth and driving engagement in content. It really extends the shelf life of content.”

* On Gen Z’s interest in Twitter as opposed to other platforms: “[White Sox & Bulls Chair Jerry] Reinsdorf last night was saying that you need to really focus on competing against yourself. We’re always competing against ourselves and making our platform the best that it can be. We’re continuing to stake our claim that Twitter is where people come to find out what’s happening in the world."

* On Twitter recently categorizing itself as a news app: “One of the things that we did over the past several months is, we actually took the Twitter app and moved it from social networking into news in the app stores. We immediately went to No. 1. Twitter is about the news about what’s happening in your world. Sports is absolutely at the top of that list.”

Gayle, on what makes the best content: “They want it from the athletes first, whether it’s Neymar behind the scenes going live after practice with FC Barcelona, or Serena Williams doing karaoke on her patio in her tennis outfit, clearly wearing a Nike outfit and drinking a Gatorade, weaving in that brand integration.”

* On the response to Instagram moving away from the chronological timeline: “We’ve been very happy with the results of moving to a ranked feed. The genesis of this was we saw that as the platform grew, people were missing 70% of the content in their feed. So for us, it was about how do we actually make sure you’re not missing things you want to connect with on a regular basis. By ranking the feed, we basically were able to look at all the things that you engage with over the course of a given day, and make sure we’re bumping that up to the top.”

* On content that works better on Instagram than other platforms: “A couple things to keep in mind when programming for Instagram: the first is leveraging all of our emerging formats. The feed is where typically all of your highlights will live. Video is exploding across all platforms. We’re seeing that pretty consistently. Stories is a place where you can experiment, knowing the content goes away within 24 hours. It’s meant to be a lower-pressure service. It doesn’t need to be high-gloss, your best content. It can literally be, if you’re a brand, and you’ve got an athlete for a shoot, give us the behind-the-scenes of that shoot.”

* On influencers outside sports who are worth following: “When Cristiano Ronaldo hit 100 million followers on Instagram, he was the first athlete and the first male to join that club. The rest were all musicians. You’ve got Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Ariana Grande. Music is also huge on our platform. The intersection of music and sports is clearly where a lot of you as marketers are probably thinking about how to tap into that. Think about musicians who are also great on Instagram.”

* Cote, on the Dolphins success using Facebook for marketing: “The Dolphins have really embraced how I think teams should be looking at Facebook as a business tool. Not just a social network, not just a consumption platform, but how to really allow your content to be your advertising, and how that can actually demonstrate real results when it comes to ticket sales and merchandise and the like. Which then just reinforces the investment in the content in the first place. What they do really effectively is, they’re now shifting traditional marketing budgets to social media content specifically. And what they’re doing with that content now is taking people who consume that content and re-targeting them directly with ticket sales, messaging, lead ads and merchandise. So it’s a way to use the content to directly drive business results that are measurable.”

* On how the role of content has changed: “As anybody who works for a team knows, measurable results get to the top levels, and reinforce why you should be investing resources in content creation, and why it’s important as a whole. When I talk to teams, it’s about making sure you understand that the digital and marketing department … those can now be revenue-generating departments. Whereas maybe five or 10 years ago they were mostly just cost centers.”

* On the key to making social marketing successful from a business standpoint: “There is a level of sophistication, to some extent, but it’s something that every team can do and should be investing in. Within team sports, specifically, a lot of effort is put into what’s the next thing I have to tackle, because there’s a game in most sports every day or every other day. The strategy is sometimes where there should be more focus, because there is the capability now to take that incredible content, and that incredibly engaged fan base, and provide them with easier access to more information, but also opportunities to monetize.”

* On why one type of content may not suit every organization: “Because Facebook is so massive, with 1.9 billion monthly active users and 650 million people who are connected to a sports page, because of that interest, different types of content resonate with different portions of your fan base. There are teams that have vastly different strategies, all converging into Facebook, because there’s raw video, there’s live video, there’s produced video, long form, short form. We recommend trying all of it and seeing what works.”

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