Friday 11 July 2014

War of the World Cup - How UK news sites are making the most of sport social

THE World Cup is the biggest event Twitter has ever seen. More than 35.6 million Tweets were sent during Brazil's 7-1 defeat against Germany, making it the most tweeted-about sports game ever.
A Brazil fan enjoys the most tweeted-about World Cup ever
The match also set a new record for the number of tweets per minute, when it peaked at 580,166 after Germany scored their fourth goal.

 This huge number of online users means there is a massive audience waiting for tweeters looking to drive traffic back to their own sites.

 News sites are among the biggest of these, and this blog will focus on them. Another huge area is online gambling, which I'll talk about in my next one.
Germany players pose for an incredibly shareable on-pitch selfie

If you've read my previous blog, you'll know that news sites have a big advantage on social, because they've always got new, engaging content to talk about.

 But this advantage is diminished during matches, because everyone is watching them and everyone is throwing content straight out there. There is no first-look or behind-the-scenes access to rely on.

 This being said, the main players - including our team at The Sun - still do a pretty good job. 

 The Mirror

 The Mirror relies on written humour a lot of the time, and their writers are very funny. Which is a good job, because their graphical content is not great.

 They often post images like the one below, which looks nice, but is really not very shareable. It gives you no new information, doesn't make you laugh, and is certainly not something you just have to show your mates...


They also have some sort of gambling tie-up, which sees them posting lots of little cards like this one:




Engagement isn't great on this either. I assume that's because most people can't work out exactly how the competition works. It seems to give entrants a chance of winning £100,000 by correctly predicting who will win. But that is either not interesting, or confusing, because the tweet only had one reply - the word 'Argentina' - which is obviously not stated in the correct format. It wasn't retweeted or favourited at all.

 The Telegraph

 Almost all sport stories on The Telegraph's football account are accompanied by pictures - which is always a good start. They rarely miss a big story, and their copy is usually short, sharp and to the point. 

 The stand-out feature of their sport social for me, though, is the way they use diagrams and data visualisation. These things are shareable in their own right, and also make you want to click to see more.

They all tend to link back to their 'Project Babb' site - an experimental digital offerring which is obviously optimised for multi-platform access. It's snappy, picture-heavy and encourages users to scroll in a wide Buzzfeed-y sort of way. 
The content they have seems to translate well onto social, and they get a good response.
The Times

 The Times' football coverage on social is so woeful it's almost non-existent. 

 The @TimesFootball account appears to have been abandoned in March, when its last tweet was posted. It has just 391 followers and has only ever posted two pictures.

 The @TimesSport account is obviously the one used for all football content. But even here the quality isn't much better. 

 Almost all tweets are picture-less and struggle to get any engagement at all. And RTs like this one from their archive are as baffling as they are dull.

Time to move on...


The Mail

The Mail use their sport account to post plenty of pictures and get good engagement. They also tend to use vines of footage, like this:



The problem with these though, is that they almost certainly don't own the rights to show the clips. Many people I've spoken to in the industry think this is going to have to catch up with them at some point.  

 It's one thing for a guy with 500 followers to post six-seconds of in-game footage - it's quite another for a large media organisation to do so, particularly if they have no deal in place. And we can tell they have no deal in place, because no one does. And if they did, they would be using far more vines of much better quality.

 One of their vines was actually removed in the time it's taken me to write this blog.

 The Sun

 These restrictions have meant we at The Sun have had to get quite creative with our ideas. Images and vines are good, but they have to be funny or entertaining, and come without legal copyright issues.

 So here's a couple of things we tried during Argentina's semi-final victory over Holland.

 First is this venn diagram. It was cooked up quickly in photoshop (which explains it's somewhat amateurish appearance), but our followers seemed to love it.

Next was this one, which I did when it became clear the game would go to penalties. It took less than two minutes to do, but was really effective at playing on the fact that everyone knows Messi is Argentina's best player by far.



Our football account also uses creative graphics to deliver stats, team news and stories.

 It also posts out some cool custom-made videos like the one below, which features the Premier League footage The Sun bought the rights to. 


Seen something you think I should be writing about? Get in touch on Twitter @TheTommyEdwards.
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