Social media has grown exponentially, and it has become a staple in most sports organizations. Almost every sport organization has an account on each social media platform to further enhance their branding and have a place to connect to their fans from all over the world. But, control is needed for social media accounts, and public relation campaigns are used almost everyday. Almost anything can happen in sports that can negatively impact one’s public image, and organizations must be prepared to handle it. An example would be Kenny Dalglish misinterpretation of the Luis Suarez-Patrice Evra incident , which damaged Liverpool FC reputation and forced them to launch an inquiry into how Dalglish was allowed to be interviewed and not know the full story. One of the main pieces of information I gathered from the article was the suggestion that more sport organizations need to fully embrace social media into their respective organizations to connect with the younger audiences. Younger people’s attention span is so low that if they see something they don’t like immediately, they’ll move on, so they must find a way to really find a way to capture their attention.
As you can see from my blog posts, I am really into soccer and I follow a ton of different soccer clubs on different platforms, mostly TikTok, to catch up on news and scores. I mention TikTok because it is arguably the biggest social media platform in the world next to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. But, a lot of the younger people are on TikTok, and the older people are mostly on the other platforms. And, with a quick search, most soccer teams are on every platforms except TikTok. I feel as though more of the smaller clubs from around the world must take advantage of TikTok as by posting content that’s family friendly and engaging, it can drive traffic to their overall brand, even to their other social media accounts! Big clubs have already taken advantage of this and, while some organizations have taken a more meme approach, others have generated millions of views from their TikTok account, which allows more traffic to be directed at their branding. This in turn allows more interaction, and this is the big one, more money to be made. We can list all the different reasons, but probably the most important one, would be money. But, that is just my opinion.