This past week our social media manager, Morgan, went to the Hashtag Sports Conference in New York City. After attending the conference for the second year, she wanted to share some tips and tricks that she took from the conference:
Social timing is almost bigger than researching what will perform well.
Although scary, being timely seems to be one of the most important factors in social media now. It is clear that getting your information out before it is stale is crucial. Yes, it must be relevant, because posting information that isn’t relevant or posting it too late, can cause a campaign or post to perform badly.
Engagement is key, but think outside the box when measuring it.
It is no secret that engagement is the key to any healthy campaign. Engagement is how your post travels farther and helps to get more views. However, it does take more to further engage people nowadays. You need quality content on a variety of different channels. It’s also important to measure your engagements in new manners as well. Measure the amount of direct messages (DMs) and shares your post or campaign receives. Those are crucial. If someone is sharing and DMing you, those are the loyal fans. Those are the people you want to cultivate relationships with. Those people are going further than just a like, that's how you can measure engagement on a more reliable scale
Influencers
Influencers are a huge deal now. They are the next big thing in marketing and social media. Influencers have a bigger pull than teams and companies do. When a promotion is posted by a team or company, often times it just looks like another ad. People will breeze over it. However; when an influencer posts about a product or service, it looks more genuine. Sports fans know if something does not fit or if it does not seem authentic, which is why sports influencers are so big right now. The tried and true tactics just don’t work anymore. There has been a repeated 7.5 -12% higher engagement rate for athletes who post influencer ads than when companies and teams share the promotions of products. This is something that companies and brands should start to look at for the future
There has never been a better time to get behind female athletics. Female athletes go above and beyond in their partnerships. They work hard and are extremely loyal to brands they partner with. You get more bang for your buck with female athletes than you do with their male counterparts. They’re on the rise and they are only going to get bigger and better. If you’re not currently working with female athletes or women's teams, you need to rethink your social marketing strategy.
Fact Check
Fact-checking is important. In today's society, so many different outlets and people will be posting on the same topics. So not only do you need to stand out, but you need to be accurate. With access to everything at their fingertips, people will know if your information is inaccurate and they will call you out on it. Credibility is key. Relevance is key, but as for timing, it’s still not as important as accuracy. In the fast-paced society we live in, sometimes we forget that.
Stories
Storytelling is key for your brand. Stories sell. Consumers and fans alike want everything at a deeper level. They want to feel connected to everything and everyone they get involved with, that’s why social media has become storytelling. Everything needs to tell a story. The story of your fans, the story of your products, stories of how your services help, stories of your company, stories of your employees, just stories.
The video is still big, but not as big.
It’s always been video, video, video. That is still true to an extent. Videos still perform well on social platforms. However, it has been found that in the past year, long-form videos have gained more views and interactions than short-form videos. Why? There is a list of reasons this could be, but the main one is the increase of stories like we talked about before. Stories that are done well are more normally in a longer format. Some other fun facts about videos we learned:
- Though videos perform well on Twitter, .gifs perform the highest on that platform.
- Out of all the social platforms, videos have the lowest engagement rate on Twitter.
Overall, be your true and authentic self
This isn’t new information for social media or content creation, but it’s consistently talked about because it is one of the most important rules. Be real, and authentic. Make connections and be more than just a brand.
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These are a few of the many things we learned from our time at the Hashtag Sports conference. We hope you enjoyed these social media and content creation tips as much as we did! Let us know what you thought was interesting or what you’d like to learn more about in the comments below! ⬇️