Interactive Media Consulting for Your Sports Franchise

What is Facebook?


One of the world's most popular social networking sites. Users can join networks organized into categories, such as school, city, region, and workplace. Members interact with others through options including adding friends, posting comments on profile walls, joining groups, and updating personal profiles. Once strictly the domain of college students, Facebook has exploded in popularity, reaching the 300 million user plateau in 2009.
Definition from "Winning Fans with Social Media, Version 1.0" from Sports Media Challenge in Charlotte, NC. www.sportsmediachallenge.com

What Facebook Brings to the Game:

  • Self-identification -- fans choose to follow or like their teams, voluntarily identifying themselves as fans, in the same way that donning a jersey or placing a sticker on their car identifies them as fans
  • Fan page administrators get a level of analytics -- number of fans added, comments, likes, visits -- through weekly reports [details about demographics, longer-term growth and engagement trends through the Insights feature]
  • Possible contest platform -- drive traffic to the Facebook or team page, offering something more to those fans already engaged with your organization
  • Free to sign up and use

How Facebook Can Go Wrong:

  • the immediacy Facebook raises the risk of posting something you come to regret
  • behind every Facebook page is a human, and mistakes can happen; players and teams can find themselves in the crosshairs for posting something others view as 'questionable'
  • Facebook's open nature -- you may be tagged in other's photos, posts and pages are linked to and preserved longer than anticipated