Snapchat is a very popular smartphone app, designed around users sharing photos, messages and videos with each other that have a limited amount of visibility before disappearing.
The app has seen an enormous growth in users since its arrival in 2011, and now has more users than Twitter; 150,000 million and growing.(Bloomberg Technology, 2016). Snapchat has become a valuable marketing tool for many businesses. See, Inc. article on why Snapchat is becoming a valuable Marketing Tool.
This blog post will aim to discuss how football clubs can use Snapchat to reach out to their global fan base to create a community and make the users feel more like a member of their football club, and why this is an important aspect of fan engagement.
With over 4 billion followers of football, it is by far the most popular sport in the world (TOTAL SPORTEK, 2016). Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona are just a few of many elite clubs in football that have a strong global fan base.
Having such a broad geographical distribution of fans around the globe can make it difficult for football clubs to create unique experiences and personal interaction with their global fan base.
The introduction of Snapchat into football has totally changed the landscape of how fans interact with their club. There are a number of ways football clubs are using Snapchat to connect with their fans and increase their levels of engagement, a few examples have been highlighted below:
Snapchat has a feature called “my story” that allows users to post an unlimited amount of 10 second’s clips that last 24 hours and then get deleted. Football clubs can use this feature to share behind-the-scenes content with their fans.
Football clubs can take advantage of their footballer’s online presence through a “Snapchat Takeover” which occurs when the club allows their footballers to create content on the club Snapchat account for a period of time.
The result, is a highly engaging experience for the fans, letting them see what their favourite players are like off- the pitch, creating a unique experience that has a personal touch for the viewers; a major factor in modern advertising (Brown and Fiorella,2013).
Example of a “Snapchat Takeover” by Arsenal Footballer, Danny Welbeck
Snapchat Football -themed Selfie lenses
Snapchat recently teamed up with some of Europe’s top football clubs to release 13 new selfie lenses. The themed selfie-lenses gives football clubs a new and engaging way for fans to share their support of their club with their followers. It’s a fun and exciting way to engage fans with the club.This creates a new game-like experience, according to Snapchat.
Picture of some passionate fans enjoying the new filters for their clubs!!
Snapchat offers live score match-day filters, for fans attending high profile games. These filters show live scores of the match and create an exclusive way for fans to share their experience with their friends and followers; showing their audience live reactions to goals being scored and keeping them up to date with the game scores.
Snapchat offers users the option to share their match-day experience with not only their friends ,but the entire Snapchat community of 150 million users through its discovery page. The best snaps during the game are chosen and uploaded to the discovery page, where all users on the platform have access to the content, highlighting the most thrilling snaps as the game goes along.
The result is an electrifying and lively content for football fans all over the world to see what a match-day experience is like and presents an opportunity to attract new fans to the game.
Fan sharing his experience, after the game with the “Live score filter.”
- Snapchat creates an opportunity for Football clubs to create highly engaging content that is accessible in real-time to fans all over the globe, leading to higher levels of fan engagement.
- It enables fans to share their experiences on match-days with one another; creating an active online community. As Kim, A.J. (2000), suggests that online communities add value in several ways: building brand awareness and image, providing access to the voice of loyal customers and generating revenue from new and existing customers.
- Content created on Snapchat shows a strong association between fans and the clubs because viewers are required not only to follow an account, but also to select that specific story from an extensive list. Therefore if a fan chooses to watch your clubs story, you know they are genuinely interested in your content, which can be gauged by the number of views on a snap posted.
- Mobile platform based. People nowadays are alway on the go and often refer to their phone, to access the internet for information, See Statistics.
- Low-cost, easily accessible and effective.
- A short window of 10 seconds to grab the attention of your viewer. Therefore your content has to be catchy and precise.
- Videos delete themselves after 24 hours. Therefore you have to be consistent in producing high-quality content to remain relevant to your viewers; this is time-consuming and requires a lot of creativity
- No real metrics to gauge engagement, in comparison to Facebook and twitter, which use highly advanced analytical tools to measure engagement.
To conclude, it is highly recommended football clubs add Snapchat to their digital marketing strategy, as it is low-cost and a highly effective way to give fans all over the world the opportunity to interact with football clubs in a more personal and engaging manner.
References
great post and good to know that we can use these filters too for supporting our favo team n players.
http://livesportstream.club/the-best-footballers-in-the-world-in-2021/