Everything you need to know to create social like a superfan

But where this once took place in person (for a small, lucky proportion), at arm’s length (on TV) or in the past (for those catching up via the sports pages), sporting moments and stories now take place at every degree of separation from their fans. There’s the athlete answering questions on Instagram; the replays of momentous goals from pitch-side angles; the player statement written in iPhone notes and screenshotted for Twitter: social fills all the spaces that were once frustrating blanks.

For those producing these stories, the real challenge is understanding what white spaces they themselves should be filling, what to leave to others and how to cater to the wide range of different people who will consume them. Getting this right will mean you are creating social like a superfan.

By working with federations/leagues, clubs, broadcasters and brands, we have found that it pays to first plan your parameters meticulously and then let the execution of that plan flow as naturally as possible – let’s call it the Marcelo Bielsa approach to social.

When it comes to planning, we find it pays first to think of the single, most typical person who might be coming to you for content and ask yourself why they are coming to you. This requires some brutal introspection. You might really want to be a fashion brand as well as an athlete, or a media house as well as a brand, but that is unlikely to be the foremost reason that consumers are coming to you. What is it that you have that they will not be getting elsewhere – what differentiates you? With The FA Cup, we talk a lot about not replicating the broadcast coverage or what the teams will speak about but really focusing on what’s unique about the early rounds, then stepping back in again to tell a story about the Wembley fixtures. Ask yourself, what blank space are you filling for users and why should it be you – do you need to be part of a conversation about International Strange Music Day (August 24, for what it’s worth) – or could you do better?

For a league, it will likely be because you hold footage or information on the sport or team they love. For teams, it’s likely they are looking to be part of their community – to show support or simply see what happens like the Lionesses have to engage with regional communities behind the scenes. For athletes, it is likely they want intimate access to even the more mundane aspects of life. With broadcasters, it’s likely to be footage and a point of view. Brands have a harder job, but often will hold valuable extra content and access for fans of a sport, team or athlete like Pepsi has done with football.

This typical person needs to be kept in mind at all times. How you would communicate with them can inform the skeleton of a tone of voice guideline and a content types plan (what formats of content will you provide – video series, clips, graphics, live tweets, etc).

The next stage of planning is to (hypothetically) stress test this tone of voice and those content types against as many different audience types as possible. These people could be informed by audience segmentation work, but if this isn’t possible, try to consider both ‘the snail and the whale’. The ‘snail’ logs on sporadically to a single platform, while the ‘whale’ is like you with your teenage heartthrob, seeking out every word they ever uttered in public and memorizing it for future reference. Does what you put out make sense to the 70-year-old casually interested viewer, who happens upon your video on their Facebook feed without any context, as well as the 15-year-old superfan searching on TikTok?

The output of this exercise will likely be a platform strategy (what sorts of content will you post where and in what way) and a more detailed content calendar (a day-by-day plan of your output by platform).

While all this planning may seem counterintuitive to creating social like a superfan (‘why not just hand the reins to a superfan?’), it is essential to calibrating and communicating precisely what superfan means to your organization and therefore how social will be used.

Of course, guidelines do not do the hard work of executing the plan on a daily basis – planning video shoots, writing copy, making graphics, commissioning work from third parties. And this is where the real-life superfans come in – this is where you put good social media managers and content creators in the right places and entrust them to create with a sense of freedom, enjoyment, and responsibility for the role. There is nothing worse than a tweet by committee, a board-approved Instagram post or a focus-grouped new signing announcement. Man City’s head of production Michael Russell put the simplicity of this set-up well in a recent LinkedIn post – the club makes a signing, “and we get to make videos about it”. The very best social content uses in-jokes, plays on rivalries, joins conversations, references wider culture – and the more these are workshopped, planned out and put through sign-off processes, the more they will lose their relevance.

While it is challenging to let go in this way, it is vital that accounts can respond quickly and authentically to the positive and the funny, the negative and the tragic – and this is only possible with strong parameters and empowered creators. For this reason, it is worth running through some of these scenarios on a regular basis to stress test live responses. Discuss contentious issues to do with your sport internally and establish a position on them early, for all to hear and understand.

If you can plan well and execute freely, it’s likely you will not only be able to create social like a superfan, but that you’ll be converting a large number of superfans at the same time. But it doesn’t end there. Social has the huge advantage of providing data and real responses back to its creators. Listening to these, reviewing your output and tweaking plans accordingly will mean the process is constantly iterative, constantly updating you and keeping you honest: that you will create the superfan from its own community of superfans.

Check out The Drum’s latest Deep Dive, The New Sports Marketing Playbook, and learn the tactics employed by the world’s biggest sports organizations and their star athletes to stay at the top of their game.