This week the Fast Company ran a story entitled ‘NBA Effectively Utilizes Social Media to Connect With Fans’ (http://bit.ly/94pdfg).
The article was based upon information published by Sports Fan Graphic, illustrating how the NBA has surpassed rival American sports in connecting with fans via social media and ensuring that
Sports are communal experiences.”
The figures show that currently the NBA has over 6.7 million combined Facebook and Twitter followers, eclipsing the NFL’s 2.5 million and the meagre MLB’s 1.1 million fans.
Despite the proclaimed success of the NBA’s social network policies, when these findings are put in direct comparison with Sports New Media’s connectivity generated for footballers, they appear to come up short. However, it should be acknowledged that Football has a more global fan base than American sports.
Currently Sports New media has 17,225,462 fans on Facebook for all pages, over 10.5 million more fans than the NBA. It achieved a fan growth of 1,049,947 last week, which was a 6.49% increase on growth on the previous week, while the company experiences a continual daily growth on Facebook some where in the region of 150,000.
The NBA explained their success in Social Media in comparison to other American sports as the result of passing on the control of social networks down to the individual teams, in a move of decentralisation. This has allowed the individual teams to create their own programs and web content. While other American sports have stayed with the traditional centralised policy, running social media from the top.
The rewards the NBA has experienced as a result of their decentralised policy relating to social network are easily seen. The Fast Company explains that the use of Facebook during the last year has led to more than a billion videos at nba.com being watched, this was a 45% increase in comparison to the 2008-2009 views.
Furthermore, Rosenthal Brenner highlights last year’s record-breaking All-Star Game as an example of transforming web “fans” into becoming paying customers. The All-Star game sold 109,000 tickets, the largest attendance ever at a basketball game.
The NBA also experienced a link between Facebook promotion and TV audiences. The NBA discovered that almost 50% of fans watched an increased amount of games as a result of “must-see” updates and reminders on Social networking sites, while 70% of those encouraged went on to promote the game further through word of mouth.
The NBA has experienced Social Network growth and rewards far outstretching that of other American Sports. This growth is helping the NBA achieve more world wide growth as they look to expand specifically outside of North America.
For the NBA, Social Network sites and the internet provide the perfect platform to support this growth, allowing them to communicate directly with a potential target audience size that would otherwise be unobtainable and it appears they are already starting to reap the rewards.
