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People and Pop Culture

The Sit-Down: Social media trio

Photo by: DAVID DUROCHIK
Laura Froelich
Global head of sports content partnerships
Twitter

We recently had the four-year anniversary of our Amplify program, which allows brands to sponsor top highlights from teams, broadcasters and leagues, and distribute that to targeted audiences.

Rights holders get to distribute their content far beyond their organic following. Brands get to align themselves with content from the likes of the NFL, MLB and NBA.

We have a tremendous appetite for [sports] on the platform, and it’s also a super-young audience. … Younger audiences are not consuming traditional television like they used to.

Since our NFL partnership launched, we now have over 40 partnerships in a variety of categories, not only sports but entertainment and news.

You need to really focus on competing against yourself. That’s something we focus on.

We actually took the Twitter app and moved it from “social networking” to “news” in the app stores, and we immediately went to No. 1.

I think fantasy is driving a stronger following of individual athletes than there has been historically.

As we’ve now moved into live, it’s not only live games but also original content. We recently announced a slew of collaborations with partners.

The conversation around esports on Twitter actually dwarfs some of the conversations around traditional sports leagues.

We have a partnership now where we’re now streaming 14 esports tournaments a year, which have been incredibly successful. For the Halo World Championship, we had around 10 million unique viewers.


Photo by: DAVID DUROCHIK
Brandon Gayle
Head of global sports partnerships
Instagram

Athletes are driving the boat with engagement conversation on the platform, given the authentic nature of what you’re seeing from Ronaldo, or Serena Williams, or LeBron on a daily basis.

From a team standpoint, we’re seeing a lot of adoption of Instagram Stories as a way to share not only your highlights but what’s in between.

It’s LeBron James walking in to arena pregame, which the NBA does a great job posting. After the game, it’s watching [coach Zinedine] Zidane, if you’re a Real Madrid fan, in a live press conference on Instagram.

Roughly 230 million sports fans [are] on Instagram, [and] roughly 140 million of them are following a [global] football account, bigger than the next four sports combined.

The Warriors, with their alternate uniforms, they created “Slate Night.” … Every time they wear those uniforms, their Instagram feed goes black and white. So they’ve taken a great visual franchise and customized it.

What they say was a 13x return on ad spend on the jerseys, and they were also pleasantly surprised that the people who bought the jerseys ended up purchasing tickets.

Stories are a place where you can experiment, knowing that all of the content goes away in 24 hours.

We increased our video from 15 to 60 seconds last year, and people will stick around if the content is good.

I’ve spent a lot of time in places like Spain, where you’ve got FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. … Ten of the most-followed athletes on Instagram play for those two clubs, which is insane.

Combat sports … is surprisingly the No. 3 sport for us behind global football and basketball, driven largely behind the personalities of Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather.


Photo by: DAVID DUROCHIK
Kevin Cote
Head of sports partnerships/teams and athletes
Facebook

What [the Miami Dolphins are] doing really effectively, and now several teams as well, is shifting traditional marketing budgets to social media content specifically. And they’re taking people who consume that content, and retargeting directly with ticket sales, messaging, lead ads and merchandising.

You can target people who have already watched your content. You know that’s an engaged fan base.

The nice thing about Facebook is that, because it’s so massive with 1.9 billion monthly active users now, and the interest of the audience is so diverse, different types of content resonate with different portions of your fan base.

There are teams that have vastly different content strategies all converging into Facebook. There’s raw video, live video, produced video, long form, short form. We recommend trying all of it and seeing what works.

The last thing you want is apathy. You want your fans to care.

[Tom Brady] embodies what it means to give that “peek around the curtain” to be funny and give people an insight into his life. What he really does effectively is that eight of 10 of his posts are organic, and the other two are sponsored posts that look very organic and thus perform really well. It’s not just putting a logo somewhere.

We’re also investing in new things like esports and high school basketball. We had a summer high school basketball game through a site called Ball Is Life stream live on Facebook, but they made it interactive by letting fans vote for the dunk contest.

In the U.S., there’s 142 teams in the five leagues plus relationships with colleges and European football teams, cricket, so it’s hard to put a number on it. Me personally, I’ve probably had a conversation with 100-plus teams.

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