Digital Media Cafe Blog Week Six – David Granger
December 12, 2013
Welcome to the latest blog for iSportconnect TV’s Digital Media Café. This week we’re going to take a look at what the worlds of football, basketball, and the winter Olympics are doing online.
Team in Focus
The LA Lakers are one of those domestic teams which cross over into international brand recognition. Like the English or Spanish football teams, their name has great global appeal, even if you don’t know where they are in the league.
Their social media numbers and the content they produce has helped re-enforce this reputation.
As the NBA’s most popular team, they can boast a Facebook following of 17.2 million and on Twitter that number is more than 3.5 million.
Interestingly, they were one of the first teams to get on board with Instagram. They’re followed by more than 900 thousand on the picture sharing site with images of everything from team practice, the facilities and the cheerleaders.
As well as being one of the most conversational teams on social media, their fans can be some of the most controversial, taking to Twitter and Facebook with some ferocity if their team is the subject of criticism. It’s not always sociable on social.
Fan Interaction
Most teams and associations like to know where their fans are – and hopefully it’s either filling stadiums or watching on television. But Catalyst PR has also tried to find out where social channels sports fans congregate. You can find the 2013 Catalyst Fan Engagement Study on their website and it makes for interesting reading: in this year’s study Facebook was twice as popular than Twitter with fans, but during an event, Twitter is checked more than Facebook… and YouTube and Google+ are the rising starts of sharing content to friends.
Athletes Getting It Right
Well, this is a group of athletes really. The Twitter feed for Leicester City Football Club gets an honourable mention this week. While the team themselves have had a roller coaster of late – mostly good in 2013 – their Twitter feed is a really great example of content which encompasses not just the games, but the build-up, the players off-duty and most importantly the fans themselves.
One for your lunch hour
This one comes courtesy of the Mashable website where they have found eight very specific things which are banned from next year’s Winter Olympics. And while it may seem fairly obvious that branded goods are on the contraband list, the fact that televisions, thermos flasks and bicycles are all illegal seem a little less logical. Those and large flags. For the full story check out mashable.com.
