Mets Social Media Dir Will Carafello (@WillCarafello) did not grow up with social media. Rather, he had to learn on the fly. He said his philosophy is to “look at it like a TV network or radio station; every time you turn it on there is new and fresh content.” Serving as the Devils Dir of Marketing, he took on the team’s social media efforts before moving to the Mets after the ’13 season. Carafello said, “Baseball was a lot bigger than I anticipated.”
Planning daily content for a six, seven-month period:
One of the things we do is our TMZ meeting. Our social media staff -- and people from other departments are welcome to join us if they have ideas -- we’ll go through what’s going on. We focus on 24 hours, but we are also coming up with longer content. One of the nice things about having a game almost every day is we’ll have new content every day. Going into my third season, there are a lot of things that I’ve been able to check off the list of things from when I first got here that I’ve wanted to do. But there is still a pretty full list of stuff we would love to get better at and provide our fans.
Why the Mets are successful on social media:
We try to mix it up throughout the day. If we have a couple news stories on the site, we’ll mix in some videos, some stuff that doesn’t have to do with baseball if our players are doing stuff off the field. I feel I have a pretty good relationship with our staff and players, so we are able to get a lot of stuff. Our team has really embraced social media even though we don’t have the most social team. They are willing to help us and provide Mets fans with stuff. They understand the value of social media and the benefits. During the playoffs and the World Series, we were producing content as quickly as every 15 minutes. That’s extremely aggressive and there’s probably more breathing room, but the engagement numbers were through the roof.
Why MLB teams tend have a stronger presence on Facebook:
MLBAM does a really good job on helping us with that, providing us with native videos and working directly with Facebook on things. They do give us a heads up on stuff that is going to happen, like Facebook Live. This is the first season going into where we’ll have access to it, but even before they were keeping us aware of it. Video is something. Facebook holds with the highest regard, and baseball allowing us to post highlights and post video on there.
Getting into social media:
When I was working with the Devils, during the offseason we got a new president and he came in and we were spending $1 million in marketing and said we weren’t going to do that the next year so we had to come up with ways to sell more tickets and spend less money in the market. I saw an article in SBJ where it said the Celtics weren’t going to spend money on marketing and just use social media. I brought that to his attention and that was the winter we decided to go all-in on social media. It became an evolve or die kind of thing. I jumped in on social because we were trying to get better in marketing. I couldn’t have prepared for it with schooling. I had been working for almost a decade before social media became a serious marketing asset for us.
Transitioning from Devils to Mets:
From a technical aspect, it was easy. From a league-to-league jump, it was different. MLB has MLBAM, the NHL did not have that. There were some rules and stuff that I had to learn. There were a lot of assets that Advanced Media provides. MLB and the Mets’ social followings were significantly larger than what we had at the Devils. Just realizing how quickly that stuff could get picked up or how quickly information goes out.
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