Millions of NFL fans likely are accustomed to using Twitter to express their opinions on anything going on in the NFL, whether it’s a major scandal, a highlight-reel play, or a star player’s off-the-field hobby. They might not be quite as used to expressing their opinions via direct message.
That’s the angle the NFL and Twitter are taking to increase fan engagement surrounding the Pro Bowl. The two companies on Tuesday announced the first-ever use of Twitter’s direct messaging function to vote players into the Pro Bowl.
“We always try to find new and unique ways for fans to vote for their favorite players in the Pro Bowl,” Kaycee Canlas, the NFL’s director of club business development, told SportTechie by phone. “So last year, millions of votes were cast during the voting period, and we wanted to explore other avenues to build upon that success, so we thought it was a no-brainer for us to partner with Twitter by creating a fun way for fans to vote on a social media channel that they’re already using to engage with the NFL and their favorite teams.”
By going to Twitter for Pro Bowl voting, which has traditionally been done through an online ballot, the NFL is trying to reach a much younger audience presumably comprised of millennials and Generation-Zers.
“Throughout the Pro Bowl and really all of our events, we focus on reaching fans where it makes sense to reach them. Obviously there’s a lot of fans who use social media, a lot of our fans are on Twitter, and the Pro Bowl broadly is a really youth-focused event for us,” Matt Shapiro, the NFL’s director of event strategy, said by phone. “We’re trying to reach fans of all ages, but really a focus on our younger fans, and we know many of those fans are on Twitter, so for us, this partnership and this execution makes a lot of sense to keep driving fan engagement tied to the Pro Bowl.”
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Beginning today and extending through Dec. 14, fans will be able to send the NFL a direct message accessed through “entry cards” tweeted by all 32 franchises or through the NFL’s Twitter profile. Through the DM, fans can select players by position group, player name, or team name. Fans can vote for as many players as they would like. After voting, fans can tweet or follow the NFL or the players they voted for.
During the final week of voting, fans can also tweet their vote using #ProBowlVote and including the first and last names — and Twitter handles — of every player they want to vote for.
“In partnership with the NFL, our objective is really simple: We want to bring the Pro Bowl to the fingertips of each fan who comes to Twitter to tweet about the Pro Bowl,” TJ Adeshola, Twitter’s head of U.S. league partnerships, told SportTechie. “This is the perfect way to go about doing that.”
The Pro Bowl idea came to fruition after brainstorming sessions between Twitter and the NFL, Adeshola said. Twitter was the NFL’s 2016 streaming partner for Thursday Night Football, but the NFL gave those rights to Amazon for this season. Twitter and the NFL have been partners in some form for nearly five years, and this season Twitter has been exclusively streaming “NFL Blitz,” a live evening news show that runs Monday through Thursday.
As part of the Direct Message Voting Experience, Twitter is handling the back-end logistics involving vote-counting and a lot of data and analysis. That data will include who played for which team(s) and which teams have Pro Bowl-eligible players, according to Adeshola.
“That’s what makes the experience so robust — we fed into this experience all types of information, stats, analytics, and names that will allow users to make educated decisions as to who they want to vote for,” Adeshola said. “And then ultimately the output of that will be votes that the NFL can tally and use to contribute to who ends up playing in the Pro Bowl.”
One significant aspect of the entire Pro Bowl experience is social media as a whole. With fans now using Twitter to vote players in through direct message or tweet, conversation around those players is likely to increase manyfold. Fans will have the power to use their votes to start trends or join them, and players will be able to engage with fans throughout the voting process and the game itself due to more relaxed NFL social media policies surrounding that event.
“Over the last few years you’ve seen us relax some of our policies related to social media when it comes to our players in and around that week and that game,” Shapiro said, “just (because) it’s such a great opportunity to both literally and figuratively take their helmets off and show their personalities a bit more in the week leading up, whether it’s with our skills competition or game day where they’re able to engage fans more via social media.”
And the fan vote isn’t the only one that matters; fellow players and coaches also have a say in the 88 players who will participate in the game.
The NFL will announce the Pro Bowl rosters in a special broadcast on Dec. 19. The Pro Bowl will kick off at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 28 in Orlando. It will be simulcast on ESPN and ABC.
“We’re stoked about it. We’ve never done it in the sports space, per se…,” Adeshola said. “This experience feels so inherent and so natural to sports that we couldn’t be more excited to test it on a platform like the Pro Bowl, so we’re pumped, the league is pumped.”
(Photo by Scott Clarke / ESPN Images)