The return of sports in 2020 is being welcomed with open arms by fans craving a sense of normalcy and reconnection with their favorite teams. Superfans are accustomed to flooding stadiums and experiencing the tangible thrill of a game in-person: seeing themselves on the Jumbotron, winning a shirt in a t-shirt toss, and feeling a part of something bigger than themselves. The question for teams and their sponsors amidst the era of empty stadiums remains how to capture that same excitement and fan engagement for a fanbase that’s completely at home.
Digital fan engagement has been a fast rising tactic increasingly employed by leading teams over the last few years, but now it’s getting a turbo boost. Fans have always loved to feel recognized and special, and now more than ever, as your research likely shows, it is essential that teams focus on digital fan engagement across social platforms. Rather than simply shooting content at the audience, it needs to be a two-sided conversation and experience for fans to feel connected. In this post, we share tactics to increase fan engagement from home. While these are customized for sports teams, such strategies can be applied to any consumer brand looking to boost digital engagement.
Here are a few ways to promote excitement and engagement from home:
- Celebrate the Superfans: Surprise and delight fans at home with at-home-party kits and inspire them to share authentic superfan UGC of their special setups at home. In addition to cementing loyalty, this is a great mechanism to reach friends of fans with that authentic excitement and drive tune-in.
- Utilize Hashtags: This is a powerful tool to shape the conversation and get people posting around key themes, and needs to be more clever and timely than a set-it-and-forget-it #teamname attached to each post. Fans will get to talking amongst themselves online, and recreate the peer interaction and shared excitement inherent to team sports, but teams & organizations need to consistently create their own content that utilizes and promotes these hashtags as well.
- Cross-Platform Promotion: While teams already have large audiences on various platforms, now is the time to refocus on how to encourage conversation on each. On Twitter, posting relevant articles is a good starting point to stir thoughts from superfans. On an Instagram post, asking followers to comment with their favorite game memory inspires the superfans to share their own stories, and a Facebook live Q&A with a favorite player or even a more accessible strength coach can make an average fan feel like they’re getting a VIP backstage pass.
- Make it Personal: While your audience can’t step in the stadium, this an opportunity to give them an even closer look than they would get in the stands. Mic up athletes while practicing and post videos of the action. Instagram stories are a great way to give a live, inside look of the stadium. Post stories in the dugout to make fans truly feel part of the team.
- Create Interactive Filters: Since fans can’t use geographic filters at the stadium, push filters that give them the fan experience at home. The NBA has taken to Tik Tok, creating a customizable, interactive “thunderstick” filter where fans can choose their team and record themselves cheering with thundersticks for the NBA Playoffs. #NBAThundersticks has 37.7 million views on Tik Tok, a testimony to fans’ desire to engage digitally in new ways.
No sporting event can be sold out digitally. While a stadium may be limited to 50,000 seats, millions can view from home. Keeping things digital for the near future means teams & sponsors will have to get more creative to recreate the game day feel. The majority of fans that typically watch at home still need that social experience; since it doesn’t involve gathering in the living room with friends or cheering along with hyped up superfans through the TV, this shared, social gap needs to be filled digitally. This is just the beginning of a new frontier- one that our tools were built for. Crowdly’s fan engagement tools can enhance your brand’s connection with these superfans and keep them excited while staying safe at home.
If this sounds like it could be helpful for you, we would love to connect with you. Please email erin@crowdly.com with any questions or thoughts!