2024 State of Gaming Report
With the start of the NFL season, the ongoing baseball season, a return to college sports, basketball preparing for the season opener, and more, there has been no shortage of sports content across social media in September. We took a look at what content performed the best, what platforms are seeing the most sports engagement, and who the key players (pun intended) are on social.
The most engagement came on Instagram within the sports space, but there is still significant engagement on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, sports content over-indexed on the share Twitter engagement compared to the average of all US industries in the same time period (+3.1%)
The vast majority of the most engaged with posts focused on specific players or specific teams. Fans are invested not just in sports, but with the personalities, rivalries, and personal stories that go along with them. When scrolling through a timeline, seeing a player or team they care about will catch a user’s attention more than other sports content. For example, posts featuring LeBron James are incredibly popular, creating high levels of engagement for the Lakers even when they are posting about something that could otherwise be boring to audiences announcing a new sponsor.
Game highlights and content highlighting players are most successful on Instagram. Major accounts like the Los Angeles Lakers, NBA, and NFL perform especially well with their dedicated audiences. Carousels brought in a large portion of engagement, allowing for multiple moments to be rolled up together to tell engaging stories. For platforms like Instagram that are saturated with content, there needs to be a major name, face, or moment to attract attention.
Baseball teams shine on Facebook, as do soccer, tennis, and wrestling. Facebook is stereotyped as the more “traditional” social media platform, just as sports like baseball and tennis are seen as “traditional” sports. That overlap could be responsible for this content doing especially well on Facebook.
Many of the top Facebook posts were videos. Users enjoy seeing highlights from the teams and leagues they care about, and these top moments spark conversations and are easy and fun to share with friends. Just as he WWE does well with video content on YouTube, they see high engagement on videos on Facebook.
Sports content on Twitter can be successful even without large numbers of followers, making room for college teams, golf, and even esports teams to take top spots in the sports and recreation space. Content just needs to get fans talking or be compelling enough to share, and it can spread like wildfire.
The top sports pages by social media actions for September range across a variety of sports but all have one thing in common- they’re building and catering to fan communities. It is essential for content managers and other sports marketers to choose which platform they use strategically, and pay attention to what content fans get most excited about.
The following pages had the most cross-platform engagement:
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