The Nba's Social Media Strategy

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        This report was commissioned to analyze the current social media presence of the NBA and determine what measures can be taken to improve it. Through research, the NBA’s social media strategy and goals were pinpointed. The NBA has a unique social media presence, in that its content is created by many different sources. The NBA uses this diverse set of sources to its advantage by blending them with the content that they publish themselves. The NBA has its own website as well as strong followings on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. The goal of their social media presence is to generate fan engagement and increase their reach across the globe. The NBA, effectively, achieves these goals by providing a constant flow of content, and curating this content to the fans.

The research conducted has led to one recommendation for the NBA to enhance its social media presence. The only hole in the NBA’s social presence that could bridge the gap between the NBA and its potential fans is online streaming either on a social media platform or on their website. Allowing people to view live action on an online platform will not only grow the NBA’s fan base globally, but also generate even stronger fan engagement.

Of the four most prominent major sports leagues in the United States, the NBA, by far, has the strongest social media presence. (Please see Exhibit 3 for a league by league comparison of followers on Facebook and Twitter.) While the NBA, currently, does not boast the highest revenue of all major sports leagues, it arguably has the chance to do so in the future. Former NBA commissioner David Stern held the vision of expanding the NBA globally. To fulfill this vision, Stern pushed for the comprehensive development of the NBA on social media.^[1] Today, the NBA has impressive followings on platforms such as: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The function of the NBA’s presence on these platforms is to publish NBA content for fans around the world to view and engage with. This content can range from highlights on YouTube to photos from an NBA charity event on Instagram.

        The NBA has an extremely stratified social media presence. Meaning, that their content comes from different sources. It all starts with the official NBA accounts, followed by team accounts, then player accounts, analyst/announcer accounts, and finally fan accounts. On the positive side, this allows for an enormous amount of content to be published to various platforms daily. However, one issue with this is that the NBA itself cannot curate the content posted on these different accounts. In fact, this past month, the NBA sent a memo out to all 30 teams discouraging the creation of inappropriate content by “teams and players on official social media accounts.”^[2] (See Exhibit 1 for an example of “inappropriate content.”) While this may potentially scale back some undesired content, it still leaves an abundance of unfiltered, fan-generated content.

        One major issue with fan-generated content in the professional sports world is copyright infringement. This issue has reached an entirely new level on the internet and social media. However, rather than looking to eliminate this kind of content, the NBA has instead looked to utilize this to their advantage. In the fall of 2015, the NBA partnered with Verizon and developed go90, “a mobile app that allows fans to stream games on the go as well as cut and paste high quality footage to post to their personal accounts.”^[3] This is an example of how the NBA has embraced social media with open arms and utilized it to their advantage.

        Now that we understand how the NBA operates on social media and what they hope to achieve by leveraging their social media presence, we can take a closer look at some of the different strategies they employ on their most prominent platforms. The NBA tends to post short highlight clips and pictures of Twitter and Instagram, while they post longer highlight clips on Facebook and YouTube. The NBA’s Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook always post previews for upcoming games to build up hype for the matchup. (See Exhibit 2 for an example of a game preview.) The NBA’s YouTube account by far has the most highlights, and serves as a way for fans to catch up on missed action. The NBA also makes sure to post some classic moments from the past to create nostalgia amongst long time NBA fans.

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