One reason why Instagram shot to mainstream popularity years ago was because it gave once out-of-touch celebrities and athletes the ability to interact directly with fans by providing a peek inside their personal and professional lives.
Now, a six-year-old social platform promoting athleticism and fitness is hoping to do the same — and it has hired just the right person to do it: former Instagram VP James Quarles.
After a 15-month search, Strava hired Quarles as CEO earlier this month. He joined in an official capacity last week, and is already putting into motion an ambitious plan to create a Facebook newsfeed-like reel of stories curated from a select group of sports influencers.
The social networking app, which allows professional athletes and hobbyists to keep track of their workouts and connect and glean tips and inspiration from like-minded people and mentors, recently introduced a new feature called “Athlete Posts.”
“As an endurance athlete, I love that part of my workout where I go into beast model.” @carolinegleich goes wild. https://t.co/R0U7fgkZiH pic.twitter.com/ueWfLletjb
— Strava (@Strava) May 20, 2017
The semi-exclusive feature includes posts from 36 athletes, ranging from track and field champion athlete Lauren Freshman to triathlete Rich Roll, who will share content and stories about their routines with their followers in an effort to trigger a more engaged Strava community. These posts will include workout stories, photos, questions, gear tips, race reports and recommendations.
In a recent interview with Adweek, Quarles said the feature will help Strava users discover new workouts or places to workout if they’re, say, traveling somewhere new. It provides users with a new way to discover everything they’d like to know about their sport — almost how the plethora of travel photos on Instagram inspire people to visit new places.
“It can be where you share your homemade energy bar recipe, your all-time favorite trail, your tips for fixing a busted IT band, a new article on running across Africa, stories from your latest adventure vacation,” Quarles said. “Starting today, Strava’s going to look more like that place.”
By posting a photo with a caption that tells a story, Strava is hoping to be a place where athletes can share sunrise photos of their beach runs or visuals of the slick rock they traversed during a tough climb. They can post guides to biking across Europe or kayaking in South America. All of it is intended to make Strava a more visual and interactive place, which then sparks a more engaged and active community.
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“The offline impact that this thing creates is similar to Instagram. Can you help people find a new place when they’re traveling to go for a run? Can you help them find a group of people who on Sunday mornings are also going out to cycle? Can you give them tips for managing two careers and where in the workweek do you find the time to integrate fitness with your job? Those are all the things that I think are direct parallels,” Quarles told Adweek.
Fitness tracking apps are nothing new. But the idea of forming an engaged athletic community with a social feed is something that a number of companies have jumped on over the past few months, including one of the most well-known brands in this market: Fitbit.
In Fitbit’s Community section, launched in January, users interact with a Facebook-like newsfeed of updates from both friends and people they have never met who are in specific groups they follow. If they’re training for a marathon, for example, Fitbit lets them connect with groups of people doing the exact same thing — perhaps even training for the exact same race. They can “friend” and “follow” these people like they would on Facebook or Instagram, and “like” their posts or leave encouraging comments.
Strava’s strategy is a bit different because it’s launching with an aura of exclusivity, sort of like the early days of Facebook. While Strava, which claims to add 1 million new users every 40 days, plans to eventually make the feature available to all of its members, it has provided no timeline for the rollout.
Strava already touts an active user base. Its athletes share an average of nearly 1.4 million activities per day. Together they’ve covered nearly 13 billion miles while running, cycling or engaging in some other athletic activity, equating to 54,281 trips around the moon.
As the number of new athletes and shared activities soars, Strava said engagement is also increasing. The company now boasts 17 million feed views each day, 55 million comments and “kudos” each week, and 2.2 million photos uploaded per week.
For now, though, Athlete Posts will be contained to a few set influencers whose purpose is to drum up interest and excitement ahead of the nationwide launch.