The ‘golden age’ of social media is over – and it’s great news for sports fandom

Robbie Spargo, Managing Director of Sport, Little Dot Studios, looks at the untapped power of social media as a way to drive that elusive fandom, by building communities, and building brand love among that audience.

 

In the first wave of Covid lockdowns between January 2020 and January 2021, TikTok more than doubled its daily views*. By Jan 2023, that daily figure was up 8x. Not to be outdone, YouTube managed to stimulate its own growth rate in TikTok’s wake, via the successful launch of Shorts: despite being 18 years old as a platform, its views growth between Jan 22 and Jan 23 was a third higher than it had been the preceding year. Even Facebook experienced a 20%+ views growth spurt at the start of the pandemic that it has managed to stimulate further in late 2023 with the introduction of Reels. 

 

With internet speeds, mobile device proliferation, and user behaviour first firing the adoption curve, usage increasing during the pandemic, and then latterly the rise of TikTok and ultra-short vertical formats sustaining the growth of both follower and views metrics, social has almost only ever known growth. 

 

In 2023, the first signs that this golden age constant growth was changing started to emerge. Those same TikTok views appear to have peaked, with little notable growth in daily views between the start and end of 2023. YouTube also dipped after the summer, although it mounted a slight recovery in December. Facebook’s peak was later and more acute – at the start of Q4 2023 – but it has since slid back to the levels it had at the start of the year. 

 

Many have also found follower growth equally hard to come by – as YouTube’s algorithm now does most of the job of curating content for users, users have little-to-no incentive to subscribe. Facebook’s news and video feeds fulfill a similar function, while TikTok’s ‘For You Page’ is ‘uncannily good at predicting what videos… are going to pique your interest’ and therefore could be said to be disincentivising followership. Twitter/X not only does the same via its default ‘For You’ feed, but has also actually been losing its general users since Musk’s takeover.

 

For sports rights holders and marketers at large, for whom growth is no longer just a good news story from the digital department but an expectation laddering up to board level, this is a troubling scenario. Manchester United’s Investor Relations homepage boasts its 200m social ‘connections’ prominently on its landing page; social followers are part of IMG’s new grading system for ‘fandom’ in how it will rank clubs for membership of Rugby League’s top flight, the Super League, from 2025. With implications on the very value of sports properties, these market changes could create a dangerous predicament. For an analogous story from history, you might look to digital news platforms: the likes of Vice and Buzzfeed relied on social algorithms as the keystone of their traffic referrals to their ad-laden owned sites. When the social platforms’ design disincentivised off-platform referrals, the majority of their traffic and therefore revenue evaporated – there was no long-standing relationship with the publisher that had been nurtured. (For more on this, read the excellent Storythings series on content discovery).

 

More than anything, an industry change like this gives pause for thought. Why did a ‘view’ or a ‘follower’ become so important? What are these proxies supposed to actually represent? And do they still do that? 

 

The answer is fairly straightforward. As the Super League ranking system suggests, the proxy for followers is usually intended to be fandom. With views, it is, if not fandom, then the step before fandom - the top of the marketing funnel associated with ‘awareness’.

 

But fandom in sport, as any long-suffering lower-league club supporter will tell you, is much more hard-won than pressing ‘follow’ on Instagram. There is plenty of research that indicates that most fandom comes from an extremely young age, often through participation in the sport itself. In fact, the decision to follow a new sport or team is closer to deciding to take on a new job than to buying a new pair of shoes or choosing the next Netflix series to watch. You might get a million impressions of your Tweet, goal, crash or blooper – but that is just the very start of a long journey (for a new fan).

 

However - and this is the crux of the matter - this absolutely does not mean that social media has lost its utility or potential to drive meaningful outcomes for sports brands. Ofcom put Social Media sites down as accounting for around 100 minutes of average time spent per day among all UK adults. That is hugely significant, and certainly makes it a mass medium akin to TV. However, just as a TV show would not be considered a hit unless it retained its viewers, social media must do more than just achieve ephemeral awareness of our sports brands among social media users - we have to use the time they spend there to encourage them to become actual, real-life, long-term fans, customers and consumers. 

 

And those 100 daily minutes represent a huge opportunity to nourish that fandom and drive hugely valuable outcomes. But this means something more than getting a view or a follow. Indeed, it often means focussing on the fans you have rather than acquiring new ones. In plain terms, it means really, truly engaging audiences using social media: building genuine communities around your brand and stories, encouraging interest, soliciting participation and interaction - all in the name of building long-term buy-in (and literal buy-in) to the sport or brand.

 

On different social platforms, that will often mean different things. On YouTube, where user behaviour is similar to TV, average view duration and watch-time might be the best metric to target. On Facebook, where discussion between peers is the habit of the heaviest users, comments (maybe even extending to those in self-moderated Facebook Groups) could be your metric. On TikTok, where you can build communities by being inspired by and creating inspiring content, metrics such as followers, views and comments on specific content strands only might be the metric of choice. 

 

It might also mean measuring the success of social strategies in harmony with broader, benchmarked engagement research and commercial metrics, over a longer period of time than month-to-month. The Barclay’s Women’s Super League is successful not just because of the followership and engagement of young audiences on social, but because it comes in harmony with record attendances and the growing profile of its athletes in this country among this demographic.

 

More than anything, we as social marketers urgently need to build our content and fan engagement strategies far less from the starting point of what builds the proxy metrics of views and followers, and start instead from the base principle that inspired those proxies: how can we create real connections with our brands from the humans sitting on the other side of the screen.