Sport and Social Media - Match winner or own goal?

Blog post - by Graeme Cleland, Communications Director, The Inside Line.

Are mainstream sports like football being left behind by the social media revolution?

Having read this fascinating piece on social media usage by English Premier League football teams by Ash Read you do have to wonder about the business smarts of some of the leading sports organisations.

Yes, on the face of it they are turning over millions of pounds every year, much of it from TV contracts that provide wall-to-wall coverage of their sport, and have first-class retail and merchandising operations.

However, it's amazing that so few seem to have caught on to the powerful channel of communication provided by tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

Only four of England's top flight have official Facebook pages, with Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United among the footballing superpowers who have not yet ventured into the realms of the world's leading social networking site.

As Ash Read points out though, Liverpool FC is really demonstrating how such a channel can be used.

Having pulled in over 1million fans already (closest rival Man City has just over 80,000 currently) the club is not only providing engaging content for fans around the globe - it is also monetising its efforts by having a dedicated shopping section that offer fans the chance to buy everything from club kit to hospitality tickets, online video subscriptions and iPhone apps.

For what is likely to be a relatively modest investment from its marketing budget it is likely to be pulling in serious amounts of add-on sales from its social media presence from all around the world.

Perhaps even more importantly, it is building a critical mass in terms of online audience that will prove to be a major draw for club sponsors.

When it comes to contract negotiation time Liverpool FC can point out to partners that it can guarantee exposure for products to that number of people - a potentially invaluable asset.

Despite advances in measurement it is still tricky to accurately quantify television and magazine/newspaper readerships and the return they generate.

Not so with social media, the numbers recorded by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc don't lie.

Yes you still have to measure their effect on the bottom line of a business, but that is easier to directly track through technology than ever before.

Sports competitors and teams of all kinds have the perfect opportunity to capitalise on social media as a revenue generator because they produce lots of content that fans really do want.

We've already seen the benefits in motorsport, where with our help a number of clients have been quickly building up their social media audiences by providing behind-the-scenes images from events and real-time information on results etc.

With sponsorship playing such an integral part in motorsport, social media outlets give competitors and teams a great opportunity to provide their backers with even more return on investment by connecting them with new audiences. 

As newspaper audiences decline year on year it will become ever more important to have those opportunities to communicate directly with the audience - and extract maximum value from PR and marketing opportunities.