#125 The Number one mistake sports organisations make with social media

Social media is a very valuable tool for brands and sports organisations are not an exception. Sports organisations in general have been very good at leveraging social media with some of the most followed social media accounts being that of sports organisations such as clubs like Real Madrid with 138 million followers and leagues like the NBA with 88 million followers on Instagram. This incredible feat does not just stop at the organisation level but is even stronger at the individual level with Cristiano Ronaldo being the most followed person on Instagram with 580 million followers.

Apart from followers, social media has helped increase viewership of sports content with 51% of fans getting sports content on Facebook, 46% on YouTube, 31% on Instagram, and 25% on X formerly Twitter. Social media is incredible and many sports organsations are doing their best to leverage it. However, there is one mistake that is common to all sports organisations, despite size, region, or sports. This mistake is not prioritising turning social media followers into known contacts in the sports organization’s contact database instead.

When a user creates a social media account, they usually use either their email address or their phone number to do so. This information stays in the platform and does not get transferred to the sports organisation for numerous reasons, data protection being one of them. While sports organisations can benefit from fans' engagement with their content, they lose out on one important thing - the ability to communicate with their fans directly and one-on-one. Even in Whatsapp groups that fans willingly join, sports organisations can only communicate with their fans en masse and never individually. This poses several challenges such as: 

1. Lack of personalisation: Communicating with a large group en masse lacks the personal touch of individual interactions. Tailoring messages to suit each recipient's preferences, interests, and needs is impossible when communicating to a large audience.
2. Low engagement: Holding the attention of a diverse audience can be difficult. Maintaining engagement becomes challenging without the ability to interact directly with each person. 
3. With the messages being generic and meant to appeal to most people, there can be a lack of relevancy or even depth. This means that conversion rates may be even smaller.

Although personalisation has become a bit of a buzzword, it is an essential part of marketing today. There is simply no personalisation when it comes to social media. Even the advertising platforms on social media are limited to basic segmentation attributes such as age, geography, and sex, However when sports organisations convert social media followers into known contacts in their database, they can begin to merge their fans’ contact information with their other data such as ticketing, merchandise, OTT, app and website usage, etc. This will increase their ability to segment further with attributes such as preferences, purchase, viewership, and attendance behaviour. 

So if you are a marketer working in the sports industry today, make sure that you check out our Data Talks Sports Platform demo so you can see firsthand how you can do all of this. Not only will you be able to convert social media followers into known contacts in your database through tactics such as gamification and of course merging all this data with your other data but you will also be able to find out which supporter segments you should target with your campaigns and the best way to send out relevant offers to those segments in a way that supporters will appreciate.