9 Ways Professional Teams Can Successfully Utilize Social Media

Last week, I looked at 8 Ways a Professional Athlete Can Successfully Utilize Social Media. Today, I’ll be examining how their employers, professional teams, can leverage social media. These ideas can help professional teams successfully utilize Social Media, but each team must first define it’s own goals and then develop a plan off of those goals.

1. Build Fan Community
In 2009, all professional sports teams have already embraced fan involvement via the internet. Most teams have dedicated a portion of their website to community and fan building. While this strategy should not be ignored, creating an official team home on the leading social networks simply makes sense. With the huge active populations of Facebook and Twitter, professional teams can easily build a strong fan base and create a community for fans to interact both with each other and with the team.

2. Breaking News
Twitter is the ultimate medium for breaking news, case and point. With so many different news sources, some covering 24/7, news in the sports world travels fast. The Real-Time Environment of Social Media allows the perfect opportunity to break news first, directly from the source. Earlier this year, the Patriots beat both the NFL and News Sources to the break when they announced a draft day trade with Baltimore..

3. Exclusive Content
I’ve said it before, but I cannot stress this enough – fans go crazy for anything that makes them feel closer to their favorite teams and athletes. Give them a reason to come back again and again…and again. Release exclusive content via Social Media – maybe its behind the scenes video from practice or some rare, never-before-seen pictures of the team’s facilities. The more “exclusive” a Facebook Fan or Twitter Follower feels, the more interested and loyal they become.

4. Live Game Updating
Tweeting a mid game score will never ruin broadcast contracts for professional sports leagues. With that said, it is valuable to fans to see live game updating via Facebook or Twitter. The Miami Heat do a great job of this via Twitter. Not only do they post quarterly scores, the Heat also post individual statistics and player observations multiple times throughout the game.

5. Ticket Sales
Sports Teams have felt the recession and it can be seen in ticket sales. Even some NFL Games have been blacked out this year due to a reduction in box office numbers. A team’s social media fan base is a great marketing asset. Social Media is completely opt-in – that is, fans choose to become a fan if they have an affinity with the subject. Basically, a social media fan base is a community of engaged consumers who have a predetermined interest in the brand, team, or athlete…known to marketers are the target market! Pitch ticket sales and promotions (like the Falcons do) via Social Media and know that your message is being sent out to those who are already most likely to buy your product.

6. Extend Sponsorship
The Patriots have over 26,000 followers, the Bulls have close to 21,000 followers, the Yankees have 940,000 fans. These are numbers that can become sponsorship assets for teams. Extend Sponsorships by offering a piece of your social media world. Teams can increase their digital inventory by offering sponsored tweets/Facebook updates or by selling the title sponsor for a Twitter Page, like the Detroit Pistons have done. The Pistons’ Official Twitter Page is presented by National City, one of their largest sponsors.

7. Extension of Team’s Website
Teams should push their content across the web through a variety of mediums. Social Media is one of the best and quickest ways to disseminate information. The Jacksonville Jaguars are a good example of a professional team publishing their website content and articles across their Social Media platforms.

8. Events
Promote Team Sponsored Events via Facebook’s Events Function. This function, which is included on every Facebook Fan Page, allows teams to mass-invite their entire fan base via Facebook. The event will then be featured on each fan’s individual event calendar on Facebook. Combine this with #6 for Sponsored Events!

9. Contests
A list about Social Media wouldn’t be complete without mentioning contests. The Jacksonville Jaguars make the list again as they do a great job in live, real-time Jags Trivia Contests that often generate hundreds of responses in minutes. The questions are tough enough to ensure a true fan will win the prize.