Winning cures all. The statement holds true in some respects, but none more certain than with social media. Whether it’s sports or SEO, if your brand is on the up, people will want to watch. Even though this is not a sports blog, we still feel other industries can help us become stronger in certain areas. The Atlanta Hawks have typically been known as a mediocre NBA team playing in an average sports town. The situation in Atlanta has changed a great amount over the past year; the Hawks have the best record in the Eastern Conference and second best in the entire NBA. The bigger story about the team has come from their actions off the court. The Hawks’ social media initiative has been receiving a lot of renown as of late. Atlanta has utilized other platforms to build a social presence and are a good blueprint on how to engage consumers.
Turn a Negative into a Positive
The Hawks just came off a 19-game winning streak and instead of saying “shucks”, the team thanked their fans in one of the most creative ways in recent years. Atlanta tweeted out a message to fans using song titles from Spotify.
You do not see this type of innovation in too many places. The Minnesota Timberwolves copied the idea in their Spotify rebuttal to the Hawks.
Not to be outdone, the Atlanta Hawks fired back with one song, DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win”.
Play with Fire on Occasion
The dating app, Tinder, has not always had the greatest image in the public eye, but Atlanta saw an opportunity and ran with it. The Hawks marketed a January home game as “Swipe Right Night”, where fans were encouraged to use Tinder to meet people at the game. This idea was similar to the “Kiss Cam” but on Internet-fueled steroids. You get people in the door who may not be interested in basketball, but are single and looking to mingle and voila! The Hawks provided a suite for any fans who matched on the app where free roses and Altoids were available. Even if you thought this idea was stupid or super cheesy, the content is undeniably appealing. I call this marketing the “car crash method” because no matter how bad it could be, you’re still going to look.
Numbers don’t lie
It may seem a bit out of the norm, but consumers are responding to the Hawks positively. According to Twitter Counter, the Hawks have pulled in almost 60,000 new followers since December 1st, 2014. The team has publicized other social media stats in a recent press release. From January 2014 to January 2015 the Hawks increased in these categories:
Facebook page increased over 200,000 more fans reached daily; more than 20,000 additional engaged daily users.
Twitter: Over 14,000 new monthly followers; 450,000 more daily impressions.
Instagram: More than 20,000 new monthly followers; over 2,000 more likes on posts.
Now if you’re a small company reading this, don’t be overwhelmed. You can still have great numbers like these on a different scale. If your product could dunk, then maybe we’d be having a different conversation. Does it help that the Hawks are winning right now? Of course it does, but the marketing team realized that your brand is much more than just what the statistics show. No matter if it’s a great month or the worst one in years, keeping your social media content captivating will retain consumers excitement about your brand, and even attract new people to use your product or service.
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