ESPN and Social Media

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​ESPN, or the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, was founded in 1979 by Bill Rasmussen, his son Scott Rasmussen, and Ed Eagan. ESPN is an American cable television network that broadcasts sports-related shows and sporting events. Social media is very important to ESPN because in January, it was announced that ESPN would be putting 500 live shows on social media. So social media is very important to their business because social media is an outlet for them to share their programming, sporting events, and shows along with television and radio.
            According to Troy Dreier of sportsvideo.org, for ESPN’s online strategy, “’more is more.’ Reaching more people on more social platforms grows the base overall. Appealing to new viewers creates lifelong fans. Every platform needs its own tailored approach, but a success on one helps build the overall ESPN brand.”. Since their strategy is more the merrier, ESPN uses all social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and among others. According to unmetric.com, ESPN owns 68 social media profiles. They have 37 Facebook pages, 20 Twitter handles, eight Instagram accounts, two Youtube channels, and one LinkedIn account (unmetri.com), and of course, they also have ESPN+. ESPN has even developed their own social platform called “ESPN+”. They’ve selected these social media platforms and their own platform so “ [they] can have a complementary sports service in the over-the-top environment, thinking about how we’re presenting our programming and our content and our storytelling across platforms to reach and engage new audiences.”, per Connor Schell, who works with content at ESPN. As Connor Schell said in his statement, to engage with their audience, ESPN engages with their audience by sharing their content and their story telling across different platforms.  The audience engages with ESPN’s content by subscribing to ESPN+ for $4.99 a month. The audience also engages with ESPN’s content by watching the content that ESPN puts out and share their reactions on various social media platforms. This is known as “live-tweeting”, live tweeting is when someone is tweeting their reactions to something their watching that’s happening live. I have live tweeted before in the past and it’s a great way to give your thoughts on an event that’s happening live and have discussions with others who are also witnessing the live event. The audience makes effective “produsers” of more content and information because it gets people talking about the event and interacting with others and often times, the event will be on the trending page on Twitter.
            Considering ESPN’s business goals is to “increase brand awareness” according to Katie Richman, the director of social media strategy for ESPN, ESPN does use all social media tools effectively. According to Katie Richman, their approach to social media is “Our approach is to look at our demographics; who are we talking to? For example, with espnW we’re talking to women, and there is an active female audience on Pinterest.” (Katie Richman). ESPN does use all social media tools effectively because they scope out the demographic of each tool or platform and fit the needs of the demographic they scope out. This scoping out of demographics also shows that ESPN is leveraging its social media for the best effect/impression because they’re specifically scoping out the demographic people who it would effect the most. They’re trying to zero in on one group of people so their content is guaranteed to have a positive impact and help in spreading awareness of their brand. While there are pros to ESPN’s social media use, there are also some cons to their social media use. One pro of their social media use would be that they allow people to watch sports anywhere they want whether it be on their phone of their computer. Another pro would be that they use social media to break sporting news that people can conveniently check their phones for any breaking sports news. The pros for ESPN’s social media use is based around convenience. One con for ESPN’s social media use is that some information that ESPN shares is unnecessary. According to Michael Rudd of sportsnetworker.com, this unnecessary sharing of news forces “anchors and writers to try to create excitement to you when it’s not worth batting an eye.” (sportsnetworker.com). The social media platform that seems to be the most popular for ESPN is Facebook because ESPN has the most accounts on Facebook than any other social media site. If it’s working on that site, then they should exploit it. ESPN is effective at maintaining their social media accounts up to date. On this specific day, March Madness, the MLB, MLS, and NHL season has been suspended because of the coronavirus outbreak. Now it was not ESPN who specifically reported this it was but it was an ESPN writer, Adrian Wojnarowski, who was the first to break that the NBA was suspending their season due to coronavirus. Wojnarowski tweeted this at 9:31 pm on 3/11/20.
            Social media allows people to interact with others over the internet. Social media has many different uses though. News can be broken through social media, businesses can use social media to spread the awareness of their company by putting advertisements for their brand on several different social media platforms. As we learned with ESPN, you could also watch sports on social media. Social media’s main impact in my own opinion is that it has allowed us to communicate in ways that weren’t possible, social media has made communication easier and the ability to gain information better. If I were to make any recommendations to ESPN it would be to personalize interactions with their audience members. Improving online interactions leads to better engagement, more satisfied customers, and higher brand loyalty which increases sales. Another recommendation I would make for ESPN would be for them to level out the type of content they send out. ESPN way more content related to basketball and football than they do baseball and hockey. If they can evenly distribute the content for each sports they will be able to get more fans of different sports involved. I may be a little bias because baseball is my favorite sport but I feel like for a company that broadcasts a show called “sports center”, they should release content for all sports. 

References
- https://digiday.com/media/espn-marketing-espn/
-https://khoros.com/blog/how-espn-stays-social#
-​khoros.com/blog/espn-rob-king-social-media-engagement