“ESPN Today”
Everyone pretty much knows what ESPN is and what the company does. But, according to their website, ESPN is the leading multinational, multimedia sports entertainment entity featuring the broadest portfolio of multimedia sports assets with over 50 business entities (ESPN Press Room). Why is social media important for ESPN? It is important for the company because they get to broadcast sport events, show highlights and report scores, tell stories, and break down different plays (ESPN Front Row). For instance maybe someone might not be able to watch their favorite team play live, because they might have work or something else to do, they can always watch games live from ESPN social media. They could also keep up with their sports teams score on their social media as well or also through the ESPN app. Sports is really big around the world. So, ESPN keeps score and people up to date on international sports as well.
ESPN uses a variety of social media applications. From Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc. ESPN has many followers, subscribers, and friends on each social media application. Having many followers helps ESPN grow their social marketing because of the retweets and reposts that they get from followers. ESPN uses videos and broadcasting of sports to attract their followers and to gain more and more followers. They also offer a variety of sports for different preference. They have stats and records for football, baseball, basketball, soccer and all the way to UFC. Having a variety of sports for everyone’s preference does help grow their fan base and followers.
Looking at all of ESPN different social media applications, it looks like Twitter is there best form of social media engagement with their followers. Twitter is a simpler way to interact with followers. ESPN does great with posting and keeping followers up to date in my opinion. Their last post on Twitter was a home run footage from the Cincinnati Reds and Atlanta Braves baseball game 42 minutes ago. Their post got 203 retweets, 1,460 likes, and 33 comments and the numbers keep going up per second. I think it is a great idea posting actual footage from lives games, because it engages their followers like they are at the game themselves.
I think ESPN does an alright job on maintaining their social media. ESPN seems to use their twitter most out of other social media applications that they have. I think this might be because they do have more followers on this account. Their Instagram hasn’t been used since two days ago, while their Twitter was used minutes ago. Just because they do have more followers on Twitter they should be using all sources of media, because some of their followers might not have Twitter to keep up with ESPN and sports. Twitter is a social media application mainly used by the younger generations, so if ESPN wanted to reach out to the older generations they are going to have to do their research and see which application is used more by older generations.
Some of ESPN strengths would be that they have a big follower ratio on all of their social media applications. Twitter being their biggest, as to why it is the main application they use. Which that can be one of their weaknesses. As I stated above, they need to use all of their social media applications to attract all of their followers. Whether it being from older generations to younger generations. If followers see that ESPN isn’t posting on one particular account that could lead to an unfollow, because I know in my experience I do that for certain accounts who don’t post. Another strength would be that they use good and interesting content to share with their followers. They actually use live footage from games or even interviews with sport players, fans, and coaches. A weakness for them is that they just post footage, but never interact with their followers. After looking at their social media, they don’t comment or reply back to their followers. I think if they took the time to reply to comments they could increase their follower count, because followers would feel important to them. In my opinion ESPN is the biggest sports industry so they don’t really have any threats or competitors to worry about right now. They just need to up their activity with their followers and it could increase their social media tremendously.
