According to a recent study sports fans are getting their news and other sports content through social media and mobile devices more and more. In 2012 so far 26% of sports fans follow leagues teams and players through social media. Last year that number was only 15%. 22% of sports fans said that they use their mobile devices to get breaking sports news up from only 13% last year. The social media marketing opportunity is growing exponentially for these tech savvy sports fans.
Overall sports fans in America on average spend around 8 hours per week watching or reading sports content. You might also be surprised by exactly how American sports fans follow sports in social media. Your initial guess might be that Twitter would be a big part of sports in social media but only 33% of fans who follow sports on social media said they do so on Twitter. In fact most people use Facebook, around 89% in fact, and 65% said they follow sports on YouTube.
Specifically the content people are consuming through social media seems to be pretty well spread out between video highlights, written stories, and news bits or interviews, about anything from Leagues, to teams , to individual players. Video streaming is a big factor in all of this as well, for the 2 in 3 American sports fans who said they use the internet in general to follow sports 45% of them said they were streaming video of live events, with 90% of them claiming they did so through official feeds. Use of internet enabled TV’s still remains low at 5%, however more sports fans think that internet enabled TV’s will have a big impact on sports culture over the next two years.
Need help reaching all of these sports fans on social media? Not sure where to start to capture their attention? Contact Wikimotive for a free evaluation of your social media strategy and advice on how to move forward.