All across America, millions of fans gather in stadiums, living rooms and sports bars each week to cheer on their favorite teams. As far as brands go, sports teams are pretty hard to beat when it comes to customer loyalty. In the U.S., there are thirteen cities and metro areas with at least one team from all four major professional sports: Football (NFL), Baseball (MLB), Basketball (NBA), and Hockey (NHL).
Sports marketing is a huge industry, and social media plays a big part of each team’s digital marketing strategy. We decided to take a look at and compare the social media efforts of the teams from these cities and metro areas including: Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft.Worth, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington D.C.
Using analysis provided by Unmetric, a social media intelligence company, we dove into the content strategies of these teams across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and went beyond the numbers to look at metrics sentiment, Average Reply Time, hashtag usage, and share of voice. Unmetric uses a combination of technology (sophisticated algorithms) and human analysis to help marketers uncover actionable insights . Unmetric’s engagement score assigns posts a score from 0 to 1,000, depending on the amount of user interactions.
To kick off the four-part series, we started with the NFL teams and have presented key findings in the below slides: