Author: J.D. | Read time: 8 min
In April 2020, Snack Media, sports digital publisher with over 400 sports websites, acquired GiveMeSport, Facebook’s largest global sports publisher, significantly enlarging its global reach and expertise. We spoke to Marwan King, Head of Social & Platforms, and Rupert Pratt (in the picture), Director of Sales Marketing at Snack Media, about digital trends and Facebook insights. They say that their success on Facebook comes down to a number of things: a clear strategy, high engagement, simple headlines, no clickbait, fewer articles and greater depth, more staff features, scheduled content (like publishing more content in the morning and less content in off-peak periods as reaction to data insights), creating greater engagement and keeping the audience on the page longer.
SPORTO: When was GiveMeSport‘s Facebook page started and how did you grow it to such a great number?
Marwan King (MK): GiveMeSport was started back in 2013, post the 2012 London Olympics. The page was initially set up because we had a great relationship with pro-athletes like Wayne Rooney, and we decided to use our connections and relationships to produce exclusive content. At one time, we were managing the account for over 150 high-profile athletes as well as the GameOfFootball Facebook page in association with the PFA.
In 2019, we put a couple of polls out to our users to find out what kind of sports news they wanted to receive and then developed an optimised plan from that. Our growth came as a result of investing heavily in social content and expertise at a time when traditional publishers didn’t really understand social.
How did you target the audience? What was the role of the content you were publishing during that growth?
MK: We used a lot of tech in the early days to post our regular content. We created our own SAAS software that scheduled content, which was actually before Facebook even had the scheduling feature on their platform. We would create a post that was targeted at specific interest groups, i.e. fans of Manchester United, which would then work well with the Facebook algorithm. All of this is common practice nowadays.
Nowadays, social media has changed: it is way more difficult to grow a Facebook page and build engagement since users are more divided across different platforms. How do you see this evolution over time and how do you keep your audience engaged?
MK: A lot of the initial innovations that worked in our favour at the start are now standard Facebook practice. What we’ve always been good at is focusing on the moments that matter to fans. That’s always been our mission statement. In 2019, we spent a long time looking at what was resonating with our audience and then published more of it. The user experience was one of our main priorities, specifically speed and mobile. It’s very likely that we were slightly ahead of other publishers in that respect. Our website is not just a standard out-of-the-box website like WordPress, it’s a custom-built CMS and is mobile-first.
One of the key things that we have noticed in the last couple of years is how people can see content before they even open the Facebook app. Things like Apple news, aggregators, notifications get a lot of engagement these days. There are also more compact platforms in the form of TikTok, too, so it’s as much about making the content fun and engaging as it is about it being genuine.
One of the key things that we have noticed in the last couple of years is how people can see content before they even open the Facebook app. Things like Apple news, aggregators, notifications get a lot of engagement these days. There are also more compact platforms in the form of TikTok, too, so it’s as much about making the content fun and engaging as it is about it being genuine.
What is your strategy for organic content in combination with advertising?
MK: We have always diversified our content. We get a lot of our traffic from WWE, UFC and boxing content. We’re probably one of the first publishers to focus a lot on combat sports, especially boxing, where we have really created a name for ourselves. Back in the day, we had good relationships with the NBA and PGA, which all lived predominantly on the Facebook platform and which in turn gave us credibility and trustworthiness with the Facebook audience. We became the destination for publishers to consume content in video OTT.
Rupert Pratt (RP): We use Facebook as a tool to drive interest to our content and then we monetise from the display advertising on our website. Our number one product is our video player, so it’s premium advertising. One of the big commercial strategies is branded content as well. That works in sync with our brand values.
Talking about Facebook, there are so many more tools besides the FB Feed, such as Stories, Messenger (chatbots), etc., and other Facebook-owned platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. How do you combine all these tools to make everything work efficiently?
MK: You need to focus on a content strategy that works specifically for each platform and placement to produce the best ROI. A few key factors would be to ensure social and editorial teams work closely together and maximise on using the native tools.
One of the ways to succeed on social media is to analyse stats and analytics, learn from them and then adapt your strategy accordingly. What is the role of stats at GiveMeSport and how do you implement it in your day-to-day publishing strategy?
RP: Stats are hugely important as we are reliant on our ability to drive traffic from Facebook into engaged .com users for advertising and partnership revenue. What we’ve done over the years is focus on quality, not quantity. We’ve always monitored the average engagement and reach per post, etc. on a daily basis. We then use these as learnings to publish more or less of that type of content. Sharing is ultimately the key engagement metric, along with reach and engagement.
This is part of the reason why we’ve focused more on WWE, UFC and gaming, because we’ve seen that this is the kind of content that resonates with our fans. We now work to our strengths in that regard and that’s what really helped us through Covid. This year, we created a dedicated Insights & Creative team in-house to focus on enhancing performance across all departments. This is why we are so well placed to support partnership campaigns – we know what content to deploy and when to drive results.
What is the approximate percentage of users you generate from social to your website and what is the real strategy behind it? Do you treat Facebook as a separate channel or as a driver to generate website traffic? Or a little bit of both?
MK: Facebook drives 60% of our website traffic. The real strategy behind that is ultimately the balance between engagement and monetisation. It’s the driver of traffic and an engaged audience to our website.
RP: One of the biggest challenges is how large and powerful Facebook is. So understanding its strategy and what it’s looking to achieve is incredibly important. A small change in their strategy can result in big changes to our performance. We are fortunate to have a close relationship and also deep understanding of the model, but for others, which is a huge proportion of anyone looking to drive social engagement, it must be very challenging as their ability to deliver audiences might change overnight with little to no idea why. Staying on top of this is key for us and our advertisers/partners.
One of the biggest challenges is how large and powerful Facebook is. So understanding its strategy and what it’s looking to achieve is incredibly important. A small change in their strategy can result in big changes to our performance.
How do you drive advertising value? Do you sell Facebook-only opportunities to the advertisers/partners or have you packaged it up within the website?
RP: We are constantly analysing the content we produce so we can optimise it, e.g. the engaged time on our content in order to derive more advertising revenue. You don’t want to disengage or dilute your audience by over monetising them, but similarly, we need to ensure we drive enough revenue from the content we produce.
We do distribute a certain amount of appropriate sponsored/branded content across our Facebook channel, but we primarily use Facebook to drive fans back to our own, owned website and this is where we place the majority of our advertising and sponsored content.
Today’s situation, due to Covid-19, is new and unique, and demands a different approach. Even more in-depth, live and unique content, behind the scenes, etc. What could we learn from the global lockdown and how can we implement those key learnings in our future Facebook and social media strategies in general? What and how will work best?
RP: Covid-19 has reinforced the critical role that sport has in our advertising and media ecosystem, and highlighted the importance of digital consumption. Whilst we have been fortunate to have been less impacted by the lack of live sport as opposed to ticket sales, ultimately you can only mitigate the lack of live broadcast for so long. Even pre-Covid, content winners such as Netflix’ and Amazon’s documentary series needed live sport as a backdrop.
MK: We ultimately had to create more original content with more features. We started to see the benefits of original content strategy back in August 2019, before the pandemic, when we focused on having original content and features, so we just enhanced our ongoing efforts during the pandemic. It helped that we weren’t totally reliant on football and that we had other verticals like combat sports as well.
Let’s talk about the future of Facebook. How do you see the role of the platform in the future? Where will the trends go?
MK: There is huge competition for audiences across a diverse range of platforms tailored specifically for certain audiences. Facebook’s size is probably one of its biggest challenges, which is where it has been clever to acquire and innovate new platforms and content methods. It needs to maintain its relevance for so many different audiences, and therefore it surely must diversify its platforms and brands whilst using its size to try and lead and maintain the agenda when it comes to monetisation.
There are changing trends in sports content consumption in terms of time spent, or interest in different sports or segments. New generations of users have different habits. How do you see the evolution of this and what is about to happen in the future? Also, which social media platform will play the key role and how should we adapt to it?
MK: We’ve done well at condensing news into snackable content. We have seen how there are fewer people taking up long paid subscriptions, i.e. they don’t want to watch 90 minutes of football, so if you can get the content out quickly on your platform, that’s how you keep your audience engaged. Facebook continually changes its approach and parameters. You have to adapt your own content strategy to serve their algorithm. It used to be all about video content. Now, in order to win over Facebook, you’ve got to be producing original content which is to combat Google as one of their biggest competitors.
I think the key platforms going forward will be the content creator platforms such as Instagram with Reels and TikTok, where it’s all about engaged users growing a platform. Live streaming, more meaningful content and social commerce with the increase of online shopping behaviour during the pandemic will also play a key role in future social media strategies. It will be interesting to see their next move with monetising it.
RP: The key will be staying abreast of the various new platforms, acquisitions and innovations, and having the capability to invest in your own content strategy to ensure you have enough winners not only across Facebook but the entire market! You used to have a digital specialist, then a social media manager, now someone specifically managing a specific community or role within a platform. Going forward, this could be entire departments wrestling with a particular algorithm or moving with an audience based on their changing consumption habits over time.
