Social Sports Continues Global Growth
Joe Favorito visits Cynopsis, which took place in New York City earlier this month, to find out how sports continue to grow in the global social space.
Last week in New York City, Cynopsis gathered some of the biggest brands in social media and sport to delve into how and where the digital space is today, and will be going in the future. Industry leaders such as Dan Reed of Facebook, Michael Sepso of Major League Gaming and Laura Froelich of Twitter all presented on the vast engagement that they have with millennials, but one of the most important discussions centered around the ROI in the social space, and how it can be measured and quantified for brands.
That analysis was left to the folks at MVP Index, led by Kyle Nelson, who took the data not from one social media source; but five, and looked at the most engaged athletes and the best brand ambassadors from around the world. MVP Index tracks the social engagement of over 15,000 athletes daily, and then uses that data with clients to determine who and how brands can get the best bang for the dollar.
In all five specific awards were given out in the categories for Most Engaging Facebook Presence, Highest Rated YouTube Channel, Most Prolific Twitter Presence (USA), Best Instagram Account in the NFL and Best Overall Brand Ambassador in 2014.
The most dominant athlete on Facebook? Neymar, with over 50 million page likes, wins Facebook in terms of total fan engagement. Between the three top athletes in the MVPindex on Facebook, the percentage of fans that engage with Neymar’s posts (1.448%) more than doubles both Ronaldo (0.629%) and Messi (0.679%) combined.
The category of Highest Rated YouTube Channel raised some eyebrows, with Jeremy Lin of the Los Angeles Lakers earning highest rated channel by boasting the highest number of subscribers (415,476) of any active athlete in the MVPindex. Lin’s average views per video are nearly 2 million; over 900,000 more average views than Ronaldo and 1.95 million more per video than the Los Angeles Clippers’ Blake Griffin.
Among active athletes in the United States, the most prolific athletes on Twitter belong to the NBA. The entire top five US athletes on Twitter in the MVPindex are comprised of NBA players. With 5.8 million Twitter followers, Kobe Bryant is the number three US athlete on Twitter, followed by Kevin Durant with an audience of 8.5 million followers. Taking home the prize, however, was LeBron James. James is responsible for more than a quarter of the top 100 most engaged tweets this year by NBA athletes. He boasts eight of the top 20 tweets in the league. The total engagement of these posts was over 582,000 retweets and favorites.
NFL athletes dominated Instagram among athletes in the United States. The Cleveland Browns’ rookie quarterback Johnny Manziel, who in his last 30 posts to the platform averaged 81,000 likes per photo took home first place. Manzell’s authentic engagement on the platform also earned him 31 of the top 100 most engaging photos of the year in the NFL.
The Best Overall Brand Ambassador in social media came down to three contenders in LeBron James, Cristiano Ronald and Maria Sharapova. The winner of the award was Ronaldo, who is the number one athlete in every metric across social media for UEFA men in the MVPindex. At over 103 million likes on Facebook, Ronaldo has 10% of all UEFA athlete likes on Facebook and 4.7 times more than LeBron James and double that of his colleague Neymar. The total social reach of Ronaldo across all five platforms is more than 145,000,000 people.
Ronaldo won in terms of sheer volume, averaging more than 312,000 Facebook Shares per month. That’s more than 1,400 times the average for UEFA men. Ronaldo averages over 17.5 million post likes per month, over seven times more than LeBron, nine times more than Sharapova, 13 times more than the Seattle Seahawks Russell Wilson and 989 times more than the UEFA men’s average for the month of November.
‘What this really shows is the ability for athletes now more than ever to transcend borders and be effective spokespeople,’ Nelson added. ‘However the most important aspect still is engagement. You have to be authentic in your engagement with fans on a global basis, and can’t just be a posting machine for whoever comes along. The athletes who take the time to engage are the ones that win out, and they in turn become the best brand ambassadors. Quality, almost as much as quantity, is king, whether you are LeBron or Neymar, and that combination is what creates business winners in the social space.’
