Social Media is the new messenger of all people, individuals, companies and yes even sports marketers. The strategic communication process for sports marketers for companies has been severely changed due to the complete social media takeover.
The new media landscape is filled with opportunities for sports organizations to capitalize on, including;
- Marketing
- Viewership
- Entertainment
- News
- And in rare cases you get all of these aspects combined together
Taking about marketing, sports companies can push many opportunities to sell tickets, sell merchandise, sell whatever they need to in a concise manner with lots of views. Posting social media content with the purpose to market is brilliant. Consistent amount of views grace each post, meaning a post advertising tickets for sale will have the same amount of views as a major announcement. This aspect has allowed sports marketing companies to push their product to the entire landscape of their following rather than the select few searching specifically for the product. In the example above and to the right, the PLL instagram is advertising the viewership of their championship series exclusively on ESPN+ and ESPN2. The marketing benefits the PLL in advertising to their entire following on where to watch the game to promote more purchases of their product.
- When showing the Entertainment aspect of the sports marketing world, the top sports organizations in the world take to social media to display the highlights, or peaks of entertainment on their page. This brings in the interest of the viewers of the sports to watch the talents and the unique gameplay displayed
- When addressing the entertainment aspect as a physical entity, social media presence is huge as well. As teams such as the University of Virginia lacrosse page will have a “personality”. Meaning the team as a whole will be represented through the aspects of the online behavior. Some teams have snarky personas, like the previously mentioned UVA lacrosse team.
- UVA lacrosse twitter replied to the quote with “pretty nice win…😏”
When discussing viewership status, social media has a way of spreading similarly to the most infectious diseases in the world. Meaning if you post something on social media, the chances of that post being shared and spread throughout many viewers is very high. For example, the mishap with the PR team over in Foxborough, representing the Patriots. Their post tragically displaying a racist name on the cover of the social media center for the Patriots. This image was shared through every social media outlet possible in a matter of days or even hours. The amount of viewers that social media brings to the sports organization PR team is ridiculous.
Now discussing why news from sports media pages is so important in the social media days. It really piggybacks on the aspect of viewers. If you can target the entire audience, there is guaranteed nobody to be missing out.
While also discussing that fact, there is one more thing I would like to go over when it comes to news on social media. Most of the time when a sports media company announces news they primarily distribute it themselves, allowing them to soak up all of the viewership of the event.
Now discussing the very rare circumstance that you have all of these opportunities presented to you at the same time. The Los Angeles Chargers knocked it out of the park when they dropped their schedule release in an anime cartoon format. This combines all of the traits previously discussed above perfectly. This video is the golden standard of why social media presence for a sports organization is so important in today’s sports media climate.