The most dominant and popular brand on social media in Africa is a sports brand — Supersport.
Have a look at the following impressive stats Supersport has on social media:
Instagram: 474.6K followers
Twitter: 1.98M followers
Facebook: 4.8M likes
These are highly impressive numbers for a sports broadcaster, and it’s a testament to their remarkable social media strategy. Let’s understand what they are doing:
Allowing audience participation
Supersport is well-known for setting up Q and A sessions with sports stars and fans. It allows for fans to connect with players where they wouldn’t be able to do so before. These Q&A sessions are generally saved and placed on their website for reading afterwards.
Live tweeting of the games has also become an important strategy for Supersport. They have recognized the habits of the modern day social media user. Supersport has identified the following practices of sports social media users:
- They are sometimes too busy to watch the game;
- There is an obsession with watching the game and reading other fan’s reaction on social media;
- Sports watchers usually multi-task during games across several social media platforms while watching the game.
Understanding this is essential, as they provided sports fans exactly what they needed according to their particular habits. A place to stay updated, to actively participate and interact. Supersport quickly recognizes that passive social media is not the way to go. It has to be two-way.
Using the appropriate channels
Supersport is a sports broadcaster that shows basically all sports local (South Africa) and most international major sports. It also operates across the African continent. This is sometimes one of the difficulties to translate such complexity of business unto social media without sounding confused.
To deal with this, they have created different channels on Twitter to cater to diverse audiences and sport. This means they have different handles for rugby, cricket, soccer, tennis, etc. — grouping them in segments according to the corresponding sports. Brilliant!
Valuing feedback
For most social media accounts to be successful, feedback is the most important element just so it can truly achieve its strategy. Often, the pitfall of many social media strategies is the poor implementation and collection of feedback.
Supersport has made great use of Twitter, by using polls to improve their social media strategy – by asking direct questions to their followers. They’ve also looped feedback to understand how they should interact with the audience, and again, is to be ‘very active.’
Harry Kane has 5 goals in the UEFA Champions League so far this season, but Ronaldo is just behind him with 4 strikes. #UCL pic.twitter.com/pHsCQTLaNU
— SuperSport (@SuperSportTV) October 17, 2017
Sports is an active industry – in the sense that new games are played every day. There are different results, player and manager commentary and an original score line every day worth talking about. Social media sports has likewise to mimic this — which is exactly what Supersport has done.
On its main channel on Twitter, Supersport has 282K tweets and on Instagram has over 4800 posts. They realize the need for fans’ constant updates and interaction and have also utilized different platforms for their appropriate use.
So what does this all mean?
First, all sports broadcasters, teams or players on social media need to be active daily to build a successful brand. Secondly, allow for active participation of fans through Q&A’s, replying to comments.
Finally, you can’t provide a poor service and expect to be successful on social media. Make sure that the public image or service is in place alongside a very engaging social media account.
