NFL Social Media Sports Campaign - Twitter Amplify - Case Study Example

NFL Social Media Sports Campaign: Twitter Amplify Name Institution Course Date Executive Summary National Football League is the most popular sport in the United States. However, the popularity of NFL remains low in most parts of the world. Therefore as part of its strategy to popularize the sport, NFL currently engages in active social media company. This report has analyzed how NFL uses Twitter Amplify campaign to market its brand to twitter fans and customers. NFL has employed a strategy that include placing videos on the twitter page, where fans can stream the games and watch highlights of the game. Additionally, the report shows that NFL engages its fans on the platform by running polls and posting pictures of the sporting events, for followers of the sport to be able to express their sentiments and this creates excitements around the sport, thus helping market it to the fans. The campaign has seen the number of NFL fans on twitter rise to over 30 million. However, NFL must ensure that the limitations associated with this form of sports campaign are addressed to ensure that success of the campaign. Table of Contents Executive Summary 2 Table of Contents 3 Introduction 4 Strategy Used to Engage Users 4 Strengths 5 Weaknesses 7 Conclusion 8 References 9 Introduction Social media has emerged as a very powerful marketing tool today. Companies across industries are turning to social media in large numbers as a campaign tool because of the popularity of social media. Since the beginning of the 21st century in 2004 following the emergence of Facebook, a number of social media sites have emerged that people use to engage and interact with each other key among them being Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, YouTube, and LinkeIn juts to name but a few (Newman & Peck 2013, p. 14). The sports industry, in particular has been a pioneer in the adoption of social media as a marketing tool (Bruton 2015, p. 195). Social media provides users with the opportunity to get real-time updates, team statistics, and scores update 24 hours a day. Besides, social media has changed how teams interact with their fans and how individual players build their brand. Zinn (2015, p. 12) study reveals that fans are using multiple forms of social media platforms to talk about their teams and the teams and players have also taken notice of this and have turned to various social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter to leverage game interaction with consumers and fans. The American National Football League (NFL) is an example of the sports leagues that use social media as a marketing platform. This social media campaign analysis is based on the NFL Twitter Amplify Program sports campaign by assessing its strengths, weaknesses, how it engages with fans and the major strategies used. Strategy Used to Engage Users NFL is believed to be the most popular sport in America. According to a study conducted by Harris Interactive in 2012 found that 34% of Americans cited the NFL as their favorite sport (Jaffery 2015). However, industry analysts predict that NFL sport will reach saturation in its market soon. Therefore, NFL intends to increase its market share by expanding to other parts of the world, including Europe, Australia, and Canada among others countries. To attract fans and to market this sport, NFL is turning to social media that provides it with a platform for engaging with its customers and fans from across the globe. Twitter is one of the social media platforms that NFL uses to promote its brand. In particular, NFL promotes its brand using Twitter Amplify that allows the league to reach out to more than 350 million users (Murphy 2013). The Twitter Amply as a campaign platform for NFL allows NFL to promote the league by streaming highlights of selected games, which are equipped with short video ads from partners like Verizon and McDonalds. The Twitter Amply campaign has proved a big success since NFL started using this platform for marketing its brand to the extent that it has been dubbed the “champ of Twitter’s Amplify Program” (Zafar 2013). NFL uses Twitter Amplify in a variety of ways to engage with fans and customers. NFL uses live twitter’s components to connect with fans from across the globe. As soon as the big play develops on the field between teams, a highlight for the play is immediately availed through NFL Twitter account for fans. The highlights provide NFL with an effective way to engage users. Besides the play highlights that are made available on the Twitter accounts, NFL also engages the users through a call-to-action prompt on television to tweet views (Murphy 2013). Additionally, NFL also engages its fans by giving them the opportunity to participate in a Twitter poll (Zafar 2013). Once the fans have participated in the Twitter poll, the results are then discussed on air by analysts. Additionally, NLF engages its audience by posting the memorable pictures of the live games with best tackles. This gives the fans and users of Twitter a chance to comment and retweets. This way, NFL ensures that its social media users are actively engaged and kept updated of the happenings in the play. Additionally, during game plays, NFL keeps its twitter users engaged by making updates of the scores so that fans are kept on the know throughout the game (Murphy 2013). This way, NFL has always ensured that its twitter followers from across the globe are updated about the league all the time. Additionally, NFL has gone further with its Twitter Amplify campaign by creating unique timelines for all the weekly NFL matchups. This allows NFL followers on twitter to share their opinions through a hashtag before, during and after the games (Sloane 2014). This social media engagement strategy ensures that all conversations are centralized and easy to access. The good thing about this is that it allows fans from opposing sides to engage with each other about the NFL. In fact, this strategy has been the principle reason fans keeps talking about the NFL brand. Strengths The social media strategy used by NFL through its Twitter Amplify has a number of strengths that are worth noting. The first major strength of the Twitter Amplify campaign is that it allows NFL to show the NFL games on twitter, which provides the best way of engaging with fans and twitter users. As the games develop, NFL ensures that video highlights of the games are available on its twitter account, which is a major strength. Sports fans are attracted to brands that are able to air their favorite games (Zinn 2015, p. 17). The fact that NFL plays highlights of the game build ups is a strength in the sense that it generates excitements from the fans of the teams that are about to play since they are able to see these players on the screens the same way they can on televisions. Besides, unlike television screens that do not allow fans with a way to engage directly apart from making calls, which is expensive and sometimes fail to go through because of network congestion, Twitter Amplify, apart from showing the videos of the games, the fans are able to share their sentiments about NFL games, at no extra cost (Sutera 2013, p. 62). The other strength of this social media campaign is that the unique timelines created by NFL on its twitter handle for all its weekly matchups allows fans to share their views and opinions about NFL before, during and after an NFL match in a centralized place. This is strength for NFL marketing campaign because it gives fans from opposing sides to engage with each other about their teams, which helps enhance the brand of NFL (Thomas 2011, p. 91). When opposing fans comment about their team on the Twitter amplify platform, this enhances NFL’s brand by creating a lot of excitement about the games and the league at large. In fact, the success of NFL’s Twitter Amplify marketing campaign is that it has helped see more than 30 million consumers engage with NFL through Twitter with the videos streamed on the site accounting for about 5% of view rate (Fien 2014, p. 4). NFL’s choice of Twitter as a social media platform is also beneficial considering that twitter has more than 350 million users across the globe. This implies that, by placing videos of the NFL matches on its twitter account, this means that a very large audience can be able to watch NFL matches and highlights from all corners of the world. Accordingly, this helps enhance NFL’s brand presence. Besides, the choice of Twitter as a campaign platform is strength for NFL that targets mainly young audience. Kuzma et al. (2014, p. 731) study found that the majority of twitter users are young people between 18 and 45 years. At the same time, most NFL fans falls within this age group. Therefore, choice of Twitter Amplify was a well calculated strategy as it provides NFL with the right platform to reach its targeted audience not just in the U.S., but globally. Additionally, NFL usually keeps its fans and customers aware about NFL games before, during and after the game and this is strength because it ensures that fans are engaged all the time. Weaknesses Despite the strengths associated with the use of Twitter Amply as a sports campaign strategy by NFL, this strategy has some notable limitations. Twitter does not have a large number of users as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. This implies that only a small number of audiences can be reached through this social media platform. Currently, Twitter has barely 350 million users (Statista 2016) out of which only about 30 million are followers of NFL (Sloane 2014). This implies that twitter only allows NFL to reach a small proportion of the world population. Besides, twitter is not as user friendly as other social media platforms, such as Facebook as a lot of people do not understand how to use it. Therefore, using twitter as a platform for sports marketing by NFL leaves many fans of NFL out. Source: Zafar (2013) Conclusion Sports industry has become the pioneer of social media marketing. The American National football League is among the sports league that has taken advantage of the power of social media as an engagement tool and uses it as a campaign platform. This analysis has highlighted how NFL is using Twitter Amplify as a campaign platform for its brand. As indicated, the Twitter Amplify allows NFL to not only display videos of the matches, but also to engage with the fans and customers. Such engagements have not only enabled NFL to increase its brand awareness among over 30 million twitter followers of NFL, but also helped increase the popularity of this sport beyond the U.S. borders. Nevertheless, the limitations associated with the use of this campaign strategy needs to be taken into account when designing a sports campaign strategy. References Bruton, D. J 2015, Sports marketing. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, Chicago, IL. Fien, L 2014, "NFL fans response to social media posts" Sport Management Under Graduate. Paper 53, pp. 1-72. Jaffery, A. S 2015, Is the NFL’s social media strategy helping realize its UK potential? viewed 12 January 2017 http://digitalsport.co/is-the-nfls-social-media-strategy-helping-realise-its-uk-potential# Kuzma, J., Bell, V., & Logue, C 2014, “A study of the use of social media marketing in the football industry,” Journal of Emerging Trends in Computing and Information Sciences, vol. 5, no. 10, pp. 728-738. Murphy, S 2013, How the NFL is running a social media empire, viewed 12 January 2017 http://mashable.com/2013/04/26/nfl-social-media-strategy/#uZJV_101iEq3 Newman, T., & Peck, J. F 2013, Social media in sport marketing. Holcomb Hathaway, Publishers, New York. Sloane, G 2014, NFL says It's The Champ of Twitter's Amplify Program it makes millions from extra sponsorship, viewed 12 January 2017 http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/nfl-says-it-s-champ-twitters-amplify-program-158646 Statista 2016, Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2016 (in millions), viewed 12 January 2017 https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/ Sutera, D 2013, Sports fan 2.0. Scarecrow Press, Inc., Lanham, Maryland. Thomas, J. 2011, “Twitter: The sports media rookie,” Journal of Sports Media, 6(1), 115-120. Zafar, M 2013, How the NFL is using twitter to increase fan engagement, viewed 12 January 2017 http://www.r2integrated.com/r2insights/how-the-nfl-is-using-twitter-to-increase-fan-engagement Zinn, A. D 2015, Social media and professional sports: An analysis of the National Basketball Association and National Football League teams’ strategies. Southern Illinois University Carbondale, pp. 1-21. Read More