Fan social media use passes a threshold

More than half of avid fans who use social media to follow sports now do so while watching their favorite team’s games, according to the 2013 Sports Fan Engagement Study conducted by Catalyst on behalf of SportsBusiness Journal.

This is the fourth consecutive year Catalyst has conducted a survey of this type. It’s the first time in-game engagement marks have surpassed 50 percent.

Fans’ use of Facebook and Twitter, specifically, during the game has increased by about 10 percentage points over the past year and by 15 percentage points compared with 2011. Pregame use on the two sites saw a 10-point jump compared with last year, while postgame activity surged 15 points. Facebook-owned Instagram saw even bigger gains.

YouTube, however, saw an overall decline in game-day activity.

“Digital engagement and sports is now a social norm,” said Bret Werner, Catalyst’s senior vice president and managing director. “Pre, during or postgame, the sports fan has [a] variety of digital channels to engage in conversation. Social media allows for the game to never end.”

Facebook remains the most used social networking site among U.S. avid sports fans and with Americans in general: 73 percent of the survey’s 2,101 avid fans have a Facebook account and use it in relation to sports. That total is down 8 percentage points from 2012 but is still higher than a Pew Research Center report released last month that indicated that 67 percent of Americans are Facebook users.

The percentage of fans who have a Google+ and/or YouTube account increased significantly over the last year.

According to the research, social media is used as a primary source of sports information more often than newspapers, radio and magazines. Only TV and nonsocial media websites are viewed as more trustworthy sources. Additionally, young fans are the most likely fans of any age group to use social networking in some way to stay connected with their favorite teams or athletes. The study also reveals that Hispanics are 1.2 times more likely than the average sports fan to use Google+.

Looking across the leagues, although a survey-high 78 percent of NFL fans use Facebook in some way to follow the league, those fans are the least likely to use any of the other popular social media sites. NBA and soccer fans, on the other hand, are twice as likely as NFL fans to use Instagram.

About one quarter of NBA fans and soccer fans said they will view and/or respond to content created by a nonsports brand that was linked in some way to their favorite sports. That response rate is higher than the rate posted by any other measured group: college basketball fans at 20 percent; MLB, NFL and college football fans all at 16 percent.

Overall, two-thirds of fans said they have “liked” a brand on Facebook, and half say they have “followed” a brand on Twitter based on having seen a particular brand’s promotion during a sporting event or broadcast. More importantly to marketers, one-third of these fans said they purchased or used the brand’s service after connecting with the brand via the sports platform.

Soccer fans were the most receptive to such opportunities, with 72 percent of that sport’s respondents saying they’ve taken such steps through Facebook, and 60 percent via Twitter.

But fans across sports say it is still a fine line: More than half indicated that they had “un-liked” or “un-followed” a brand because the company was either “posting/tweeting too often” or was sending “irrelevant information.”

“Sports fans are willing to take an action that has business impact, such as making purchases or recommendations,” Werner said. “Brands need to earn their right to be part of the community, by having the right dialogue, offerings and content to engage them, or [fans] are more likely than ever to disengage. The fan is smart enough to know when a brand is not part of the authentic sports conversation.”

This year’s survey was for the first time replicated in the U.K. and Brazil during the same time period, targeting exclusively avid soccer fans in those two regions. Full results from those studies were not available as of press time, but according to Catalyst, results that have been compiled indicate that Facebook and Twitter use among soccer fans in the U.K. was almost identical to the use by their U.S. counterparts. However, U.S. fans were far more likely to use YouTube, Google+ and Instagram than U.K.-based fans.