The realm of social media can be overwhelming, but it also presents exciting opportunities for up-and-coming sports media professionals. It’s a chaotic landscape to navigate, but if you know some of the tricks of the trade, you can turn a fledgling brand into a powerhouse through successful large-scale community engagement.
Social media engagement is still very much an inexact science, and it often bends to the whim of different audiences. Nevertheless, there are a few tried-and-true standards and central philosophies you can cater to, to ensure you develop in this area. If you put these keys into action, you can build a community around your brand, to catalyze exponential growth.
6 Tips For Growing Your Social Media Following
Be Authentic
The first step is arguably the most important, and it can be one of the tougher ones to pin down. But being authentically yourself is the very first component toward building a loyal base of followers on social media.
To be authentic, you need to be honest, objective, empathetic, and accountable for yourself. But you also need to be true to your voice and your brand. Understanding what your brand is, and what you bring to the table as a unique voice, is extremely important by extension.
Be Consistent
Authenticity is the bedrock of your voice as a sports media professional. Consistent activity and interaction is what imparts that authenticity on your audience base. Some truths in the sports media business are simpler; this is one of them. You simply have to be consistent to build a following.
There is such a thing as posting too much and over-saturating your channel, so be wary of that threshold. Nevertheless, at least daily, you should be posting to your audience. Post new content, post invitations to interact, post thought-provoking content – anything to keep your audience engaged, so that your momentum never stalls out.
Incentivize According to Value Propositions
To have a better of what exactly you should post to engage your audience, ensure that you understand the basis of value incentives. On social media, you have to incentivize readers and followers to engage with your content. You can achieve that incentivization by tailoring your posts to your audience’s value proposition.
To put it more simply: In general, what about your content gives your audience value? Is it your ability to educate and inform? Is it your ability to contextualize advanced statistics? Is it your ability to create compelling, thought-provoking analysis? Is it your humorous flair? Reverse engineer your brand to find that value proposition, and play up to it with your interactions.
Become Versatile with Media
The social landscape is a tapestry of different forms of media: Written word, photos, videos, audio recordings – even memes have become a valuable engagement tool. To further expand your engagement footprint, you should work to become fluent in the use of most, if not all, of these media forms.
Every audience member is more attuned to a certain type of media. Some may be more inclined to read written posts, while others may benefit most from visual stimulation. By making yourself versatile with various forms of media, you can cast as wide a net as possible.
Capitalize on Engagement Events
No matter what, you’ll have to sustain a consistent engagement presence on social media – but you can make giant leaps forward by effectively using engagement events, to snare your audience’s attention when they’re most primed to interact and magnify your brand.
These engagement events take on different forms depending on what sphere you reside in as a content creator. An NFL writer might see primetime or playoff games as a quality engagement event. An NBA analyst might zero in on the midseason tournament. A scouting expert might hone in on the draft cycle’s many checkpoints. Whatever the case, isolate engagement events as opportunities to strengthen momentum and expand beyond your established audience.
Make Your Brand a Home for Your Community
Ultimately, you want your audience to feel at home when they’re engaging and interacting with your brand and your content. So do your best to make your brand a home for your community. A large part of this is simply building on the aforementioned virtues – chief among them being authenticity – but brand cohesion should also be at the front of your mind.
Ponder ways you can encourage your audience members to come together under your brand umbrella. Make your brand a one-stop shop for your subject, and create an intricate association that naturally draws target readers and viewers to your doorstep.
