Over the past four weeks I’ve been writing a short series of articles taking a look at how social media can be utilized to grow a sports team’s fan base, regardless of whether the team already has a large following or is starting from the grassroots level. You can find the posts in this series below….
Tag Archives | fan base
Connect with Tribes Instead of Crowds
(This is a guest post by Andrew Collins) Listening to current marketing principles today, it can be easy to become distracted in the multitude of social media channels and forget where the real value lies. One basic principle we’ve seen promoted and often adopted is ‘crowd sourcing’ or ‘marketing to crowds’ when in fact the…
Take Online Connections Offline
This is part of a short blog series where we take a look at how social media can be utilized to grow a sports team’s fan base, regardless of whether the team already has a large following or is starting from the grassroots level. You can see the other posts here.
The first three posts of this series have covered listening, content and community. This week I’m going to focus on the importance of taking online connections offline.
Keep It Consistent
Offline conversation about brands is still what prompts us to search for more online. If you want to build awareness and grow your fan base, you need to get out into the community offline as well as online.
Your message should be consistent across all platforms and all types of media, whether it’s online or offline. Make sure that if people see your team online they’ll recognise your brand offline and vice versa. Online and offline marketing should be part of one strategy and both should be kept in mind at all times.
Utilize Social Media to Grow Your Fan Base
When we talk about social media in sports the majority of case studies and best practices come from high profile and established sports teams and we tend to focus on how these teams engage with their fan base through social media. But what if your team doesn’t already have tens of thousands of fans-how can you utilize social media to grow your fan base?
The above question is something I get asked a fair bit and to be honest there’s no set answer – the answer depends upon you, your team and your target fan base.
Whilst I can’t give a set in stone plan that will guarantee your team’s fan base will grow, I can certainly give you some tips that will help.
Starting today, I’ll be publishing a short series of weekly articles about how I feel teams and sports organizations can utilize social media to grow their fan bases.
Know your audience
Listening is a key factor in successful use of social media. Before you jump into social media you need to make sure you know your audience – if you don’t you will end up wasting a lot of time.