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Social Studies: USA Swimming's John Martin On World Championships, Snapchat Account

USA Swimming Assistant Dir of Communications John Martin (@USASWIMMING) knows that just because it is not an Olympic year, there is plenty to do for those involved with the NGB. The FINA World Championships are taking place this week in Budapest. Martin said, “The average sports fan when they hear USA Swimming, they think, ‘Oh, it’s relatively calm with the exception of two weeks every four years.’ But that’s certainly not the case. While it’s not as intense as last summer, we have a lot going on.” USA Swimming has worked to expand its social media presence. Last year, it launched “Deck Pass Live,” a recap show of national team events. This spring, the NGB launched its Snapchat account. Martin: “We were strategically late adapters of Snapchat. We had a lot of internal discussions about whether to launch it last year. We held off until we had a plan in place and did it right.”

SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follow: Within the NGB space, I really enjoy what USA Soccer does. They have a nice consistent look and feel across their account and a nice mix of content.
Favorite app: Instagram from a social perspective and Yelp.
Average time per day on social media: A solid 8-10 hours.

Challenges in non-Olympic years:
We have our core of swim fans who are going to be interested in what we are doing, what our athletes are up to regardless of the year in the Olympic quad. The challenges beyond that Olympic year is to build on the success that a lot of people are exposed to. It’s on us to continue to sell those stories through our own channels. We’ve got new faces in the sport that are fun personalities and people who maybe made a little bit of splash a year ago, and we want to share what they are up to the other three years.

USA Swimming’s social/digital philosophy:
We really want to use our channels to inspire that next generation of swimmers. So much of our membership base does skew young. Most of our members are teenagers and high school-age swimmers, so we want to share content they can relate to, that can inspire them to stick with the sport and think of it as a team sport. Also to expose the young swimmers to Olympic gold medalist; help them peel back the layers and help them know those swimmers outside the pool.

Plans for World Championships:
We've really over the past year or so started to think video-first. That’s a dramatic change from years past. With our “Deck Pass Live” show, we had athletes for interviews, and it’s really started to grow and build momentum. We did that via Facebook Live in addition to our website at Nationals. We had about 130,000 views over five days. We are going to do that again, but from our offices in Colorado Springs. We did the same thing during the Olympics. We’ll have highlights -- the two of us on the ground in Budapest will be pushing content. We will be capturing behind-the-scenes content.

How those differ from other events:
The trend is to help build that “Deck Pass Live” brand across national events. It’s catching on with the athletes. They understand it, they appreciate it. They see we are trying to take things to the next level in telling their stories and to give a higher level of exposure to our events.

Athlete involvement:
They are the faces of our sport. We work hard to develop relationships with our national team athletes. They know we have their best interests at heart in terms of promoting them as individuals and the sport as a whole. Some of our highest engagements come from athlete takeovers, Snapchat Stories, Instagram Live interviews. The athletes appreciate when we give them those opportunities. They realize it’s a benefit to USA Swimming and our sport as a whole. They are hoping to build their personal brand as well.

Sponsor involvement:
We have conversations with our sponsors about how we can leverage posts, leverage brand and content in an authentic way. Those are conversations that are ongoing and we will see more of in the future.

Lessons learned from ‘16 Olympic Trials:
The Olympic trials are certainly the Super Bowl of swimming. It’s the pinnacle of our sport. We had a lot of interactive pieces on the ground in Omaha. We learned that people enjoyed the content we produced, and it was about creating a dialogue with them.

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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