Insights from Miguel Doménech
How to drive fan engagement and local participation is an ongoing challenge for International Federations (IF) and national governing bodies during an Olympic and Paralympic year. This extends beyond the bid for medal victories, which itself, at a regional level, thrusts “lesser known” sports into the public spotlight every four years and helps attract newcomers to emerging disciplines inside and outside their core markets.
Both the summer and winter editions of the Olympic and Paralympic Games act as milestones for sporting bodies to measure growth. Meanwhile, since the beginning of the London 2012 Olympics, which highlighted a roadmap for the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) digital and data strategies, the sector’s digitalization has given IFs and sports organizations alike new ground to promote their own digital products beyond athletic performance.
Nowadays, in the age of digital and social media, within a saturated consumer market, how a governing body showcases its competition online is as much an incentive for growing its sport as it is to nurture the world’s most gifted and formidable athletes; while its business development is reliant on how well the sports body engages with audiences which expect more of the digital sports experience across multiple platforms.
In the midst of sport’s modernization, organizations find themselves at a crossroads. While historically IFs and national governing bodies have relied on live events and TV coverage to build their reputation and drive revenues, digital platforms enable sports organizations and rights holders to communicate directly with fans. Social media, in particular, presents entities with one way to engage digital fans, while most Olympic IFs are experimenting with their owned and operated platforms.
However, even the most diverse social media strategies can be limiting for sports properties without the necessary resources to convert their fans into paying spectators. The “fan funnel” is reliant on both a wide audience reach and the means to capture first-party fan data, both of which require a diverse digital inventory, and a clear strategy for how they should co-exist.
“When an organization is thinking about its business growth, it’s important to have digital touchpoints which can be used to collect fan data and not only to rely on their social media analysis,” explains Miguel Doménech, N3XT Sports Digital Marketing Manager. “This can be addressed by simply introducing data-collection touchpoints into your owned ecosystem, such as a weekly newsletter, so as to integrate customer communications clearly within the fan funnel, including your social media strategy.”
AN INTEGRATED SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY KEY TO AUDIENCE GROWTH & MONETIZATION
As sports properties explore ways to personalize the digital fan experience, based on unique user behaviors, optimizing their social strategy in such a way that drives engagement via their owned digital portfolio is an important step towards heightening one’s exposure during an Olympic and Paralympic cycle. This is also true for building new monetizable fan experiences that serve the sports body’s business acumen post-Games.
For example, this has been a focus of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) and FIBA 3×3 – the organizing body for Olympic 3×3 basketball – to drive audience growth via its social channels in the build-up to the discipline’s second appearance at an Olympic Games in Paris this summer.
Notably, FIBA 3×3 grew its social media audience by 88 percent to 1.6 million throughout 2023, driven mainly by its TikTok posts, which combined a paid-media campaign and, importantly, a dedicated content strategy for the channel. With the support of N3XT Sports, FIBA 3×3 is evaluating its next steps, including the introduction of a digital newsletter so as to enable the organizing body to connect with its most engaged fans ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
In the months leading to the Olympic and Paralympic Games, there are several approaches IFs and national governing bodies can take in order to maximize their social media growth and engagement. They include:
- Defining a content matrix and the creation of various content formats. While video content is a popular choice for building narratives, a mix of dynamic and static content helps generate higher engagement per post and greater value for the fan.
- Be present on channels where your audience is most active. Tailoring posts and post-frequency based on user behaviors across each individual social media channel can drive higher engagement per post, as long as they are distributed strategically and consistently. While viral posts maximize exposure among peripheral fans, strategic posts based on user interests can be used to drive conversions in the fan funnel.
- Diversify your content series. Sports bodies tend to ramp up their social content production during major events, though could benefit from the creation of campaigns delivered outside of their competition windows.
- Build the athlete’s image. Fans enjoy player journeys and relate to the athletes they follow. Understanding fans’ likes and dislikes, including their player- and team-preferences, can inform more engaging content.
- Paid-media campaigns drive audience growth, visibility, engagement, and fan monetization. Organic audience growth will steadily increase over time. However, paid-media campaigns can boost engagement at strategic moments (i.e pre-Olympics) and bring social followers into the fan funnel by promoting the property’s owned and operated products.
- Elevate search engine optimization (SEO) via your social media channels. This can be achieved by adopting keywords and hashtags into individual posts, using subtitles in video content, and adding “alt-text” whenever publishing blog posts and photos via your social channels.
“For emerging sports, the Olympics is an opportunity to maximize exposure, so it is important that they make a determined effort to grow their presence, particularly via social media, so that they gain more visibility in time for the event,” Miguel continues. “Thereafter, a clear conversion strategy is necessary for attracting more fans to your owned products, so as to communicate with fans directly and collect user information which, in turn, informs more relevant content production and more concrete strategies across your digital and social media platforms.”
WHAT’S N3XT?
The process of growing and retaining audiences is high on the agenda for sports organizations seeking to expand their own digital offering. Furthermore, while a healthy social media following gives properties scope to navigate highly engaged fans, the development and implementation of owned direct-to-consumer (D2C) platforms which collect first-party fan data offers IFs new insights into user demographics and interests. Coming full circle, this informs the types of content that travel well across the organization’s social media channels.
For example, N3XT Sports proprietary research shows that Olympic IFs with a higher social media presence are more likely to collect fan data via an over-the-top (OTT) streaming service than those with fewer social media followers. Meanwhile, Olympic IFs with multiple data touchpoints also have a higher overall social media following across multiple channels.
Among the most digitally mature, football’s governing body FIFA, the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB), and FIBA have the strongest social media presence of those IFs which own a diverse digital portfolio. By comparison, the World Badminton Federation (BWF) owns a sophisticated social media strategy, though has a lower data maturity, highlighting – for example – an opportunity where an IF can look to augment its fan funnel by integrating its social media strategy and drive more digital subscriptions.
Elsewhere, United World Wrestling (UWW), the governing body of Olympic wrestling, has significantly grown its digital and social media presence since the launch of its UWW+ OTT streaming service in time for the 2023 UWW World Championships (WCH23) last September. As part of the IF’s ongoing digital strategy, with the support of N3XT Sports, UWW’s improved data maturity informs its social-video campaigns and leverages audience analytics using artificial intelligence (AI).
Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement data and digital transformation strategies across a multitude of sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To find out more about how N3XT Sports can serve your organization, fill out the form below, and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.