Which Social Media should a Sport Club choose ?

The communication through Social Media can be used by a Sport Club to create a community where all supporters and members can share ideas, emotions and passion for their sport club.

Which kind of Social Media is more useful for a Sport Club or Sport Association to create a community?

There is no perfect rule for the choice of Social Media, but there for sure must be a clear Strategy based on the characteristics of the target and on the kind of message communicated.

With the right choice of SoMe, we can direct more people to the official website page. The increase of  traffic to the club webpage should be the Social Media activity’s final goal.

How can we choose between the different Social Media?

The first suggestion could be to have a look outside of the window and see what our competitors or similar are doing.

I found the tool offered by similarweb.com very useful. This tool enables the comparison between the website with other similar websites, in terms of the sport, the audience, and the Social Media activity.

• Step 1:  I consulted similarweb.com while searching for the most followed websites for each sport (e.g. basketball). The selection can be done with different options, looking at the worldwide ranking as well as selecting the market according to the Country or Area you are working with.
• Step 2 : I picked some of the websites ranked between position 1 to position 20.
• Step 3: I also checked minor clubs more similar to mine.
• Step 4 I analyzed the following Basketball Associations: NBA (rank 1), FIBA (rank 13)  Euroleague (rank 45) Aquilabasket (rank 263), and Swissbasket (rank 392). I considered the number of visits on the website in the month of June and  the % of traffic brought by Social Media. The difference in terms of visitors on their website is big, starting from 57,65M of visits in June on NBA and finishing with 18,30K visitors on Swissbasket in the same period. The traffic web is 98%-100% organic. The conversion rate from Social Media is between 5% and 11% and the choice of Social Media  independently from the number of visitors, seems to be very similar. As we can see in the graphic below, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube represents the most used Social Media for communication in sports such as basketball.

Conclusion

It seems that if a Basketball club wants to invest in communicating through Social Media, the first choice should be Facebook. From the graphic we see that for smaller Clubs (e.g. Aquilabasket, Swissbasket), if compared to the higher ranked ones (NBA, FIBA), Facebook is absolutely the first choice, followed by Twitter and Youtube. This choice is very much connected to the possibilities of having a quick and easy communication with the audience even with low budget allocated for communication. After analyzing the different realities in Basketball, it could be interesting to have an overview on other popular sports such as Soccer or Tennis.