2012 has been, without a doubt, Twitter’s biggest year so far. It has played an enormous role in helping sports brands reach out to far wider global audiences than ever possible before.
Twitter was used to great effects during the London Olympics, raising the profiles of individual sports and athletes alike. Hailed as the first ‘social games’, Twitter and Facebook reinforced London as one of the most successful Olympic games in recent history.
One of the best examples of strategic repositioning is the slightly less mainstream sport of UFC. The Ultimate Fighting Championship has become the fastest growing sport in the world thanks to its innovative approach to social media. UFC President Dana White introduced a new initiative in 2012 to reward athletes with bonuses for the use of Twitter to engage with fans. He has more than 2.3 million Twitter fans himself and all 475 UFC fighters now have a Twitter account.
Encouraging the fighters to take to Twitter to engage with fans helped to re-brand the sport from a violent underground world to a widely accepted part of American sporting culture.
Anderson Silva is currently the most followed UFC fighter with over 2.8 million followers. The UFC also saw huge interaction with Facebook, with almost 1 million likes, and was the first sporting organisation to live stream a series of preliminary bouts for UFC Fight Night in January 2011. The sport has a huge following on YouTube with video blogs generating a lot of attention for the UFC brand; further to this, Pinterest and Spotify are being used increasingly to make sure the brand is everywhere the fans are.
The Internet has always been the biggest channel of communication for UFC. Long before they were allowed to show fights on TV and pay-per-view, people would frequent the UFC website for the latest news, so moving to social media has given the UFC brand and the athletes’ personal brands a real-time voice.
As we enter 2013 questions are being asked as to how social media will evolve to help brands reposition themselves and get the most value from communication with their fans. Dana White’s response to the question is to remain ‘super aggressive in any form of social media’, quite fitting for the President of the UFC.
At Underscore we are intrigued to see how, or if, the smaller Olympic sports such as handball will continue to use social media and, more importantly, what role social media will play at Rio 2016. Anybody have any ideas?