Does Social Care Even Matter for Global Sports Brands?. Does social care, something I’m obviously passionate about, actually matter for sports teams? Is Football, or ‘Football’, more social? To put bluntly it’s obvious that Twitter, and social media more broadly, is treated as a marketing tool only. The brands/sports teams analyzed take social seriously as a marketing tool, which is very logical considering that sports teams create significant revenue from the the retail / e-commerce side of their business, but not as a Social Care channel. But sports teams are missing an opportunity. Sports teams should be looking to encourage their community of loyal fans to communicate. Companies don’t want to miss a service related tweet, and by prioritizing customer service content you can make sure that important tweets get handled faster. I admit, it’s not business critical for sports teams to engage with fans over social. Sifting through the noise to find opportunities to engage can often lead to a sale.
I’m a Brit. But I’ve lived in America for three years. This
means I’ve been lucky enough to immerse myself in both cultures,
benefiting from the best of both worlds (to my British friends not
all Americans have perfect teeth and to my American friends not all
Brits know the Queen!).
This does not mean that relocating your life from London to NYC
brings both opportunities and challenges – especially being distant
from friends and family. One thing that made the initial transition
easy, apart from the very similar language, was my cross-Atlantic
love of sports. Although English Football (known to my Yank friends
as soccer) will always be Football to me, my love of American
Football helped me acclimatize and not stick out like a sore thumb
at bars.
But this got me thinking. Does social care, something I’m
obviously passionate about, actually matter for sports teams? Is
Football, or ‘Football’, more social? Which one is truly bigger and
better at customer engagement over Twitter (public) channels?
To find out I used the custom built Conversocial Twitter Tracker
to analyze the engagement of brand handles for the top 5 teams (in
league standings as of October 28th).
Whilst doing this it’s important to remember:
- Sports teams are brands, meaning that they’re conscious of
their reputation and how it impacts revenue and the bottom
line. - The top consumer generated revenue sources for sports teams are
ticket sales, merchandizing and TV rights. - With such high volumes of social chatter, teams must carefully
decide which posts, comments and tweets are worthy of a reply.
Results:
How are these figures calculated?
*We used the Twitter Search API to find mentions (up to 2001
max) of each Twitter handle in October 31st 2016. We then gathered
and matched the replies to those mentions and calculated the time
taken in each case, excluding…
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