1. Unbranded baseball conversation - where, how and when are fans watching games?

When researching the vast world of sports, sometimes increasing the data to analyze can become unwieldy. With tens of national teams, hundreds of different players, and thousands of different games, the data can get a bit deafening in baseball. A general conversation about baseball, on the other hand, can have a multitude of advantages. By filtering out the location and rivalry specific interests and conversation that is included when examining data compiled about baseball and all its teams, the insights in the data become more clear. More popular teams rise to the top, along with more prolific players. Specific demographic information and relevant interests become more easily identified in a general conversation, which can inform a number of different strategies.

[Download PDF to see Graph]

These types of general conversation insights can be applied very well to the World Series. General baseball fans and viewers share an identical demographic and set of interests with those discussing the World Series, giving us a great audience to explore.

Fans watch baseball games in a variety of environments with friends, co-workers, family members or by themselves. Marketing professionals can use audience habits to form strategies at many different levels. We’ve broken down their viewing habits into four categories:

[Download PDF to see Graph]

• Watching With a Friend – fans talking about watching baseball games with a friend or groups of friends
• Going to/at a baseball game – fans discussing their plans to go to a baseball game or being at a baseball game (ex: watching at a field or stadium)
• Watching While Drinking/At a Bar – fans talking about having beers or drinks while watching, or talking about watching a baseball game at a bar or pub
• First Game – fans talking about watching/ attending their first baseball game ever or their first baseball game of the new season

Information like this can be used in a multitude of ways, namely to target specific audiences with campaigns (ex: beer drinkers with beer commercials), to gauge excitement (based on how people are discussing their first games), or measure audience sentiment. Knowing when people are discussing these topics can also help inform marketers on best times to air advertisements or try to connect with their audience:

[Download PDF to see Graph]

2. World Series conversation - where is the “sweet-spot” for advertisers to focus engagement?

Engaging the right audiences over social media can attract and retain new viewers for a league. With access to social insights centered around volume, topic, and date information, sports marketing professionals have ample data to discover the “sweet spot” that nets them the most amount of views and interactions. Being able to access accurate and specific data regarding consumer behavior makes uncovering trends in viewership and interaction that much easier, and is crucial to understanding the behaviors and habits behind consumers viewing patterns. Ratings and raw numbers on the amount of people watching a program are great for baseline statistics, but social insights are what help marketers really dive into and understand that data.

By examining the wave graph below displaying the rise and fall of topics in specific years where the World Series continued on to seven games, we can uncover an interesting trend. While both the first game and the seventh game of these series have relatively high amounts of conversation, there is a significant lull in conversation between those intermediate games. Games 2 through 6 have significantly fewer social conversations than the first and last games, and this is a key identification for marketers when looking for the greatest reach for engaging their audiences. This method can be applied across tournaments and even seasons to identify certain days, matchups, or competitions that produce the largest audiences.

Want more like this?

Want more like this?

Insight delivered to your inbox

Keep up to date with our free email. Hand picked whitepapers and posts from our blog, as well as exclusive videos and webinar invitations keep our Users one step ahead.

sign up

By clicking 'SIGN UP', you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

SIGN UP

By clicking 'SIGN UP', you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

[Download PDF to see Graphs]

3. World Series conversation - knowing your audience

One of the most important advantages of social media analytics and the subsequent insights from the data is the ability to know and understand your audience in a completely new way. Each consumer has a specific set of unique interests and opinions, and combined those consumers form a distinct audience. While things like focus groups and demographic analyses can help shed some light on what consumers are interested in and how they react to certain stimuli, social media remains the largest source of unsolicited consumer opinion. Access to this data can uncover trends or insights that would never usually be discovered through traditional means, and helps to aggregate opinion and response data to form a coherent conversation that marketing professionals can measure.

In 2013, Chevrolet to plan a marketing strategy for the World Series that was pulled from the campaign at the last minute. The idea involved placing placards under fan seats that when held up during an intermission would spell out “Silverado Strong”, a slogan that had long been used for their current advertising strategies. The planned strategy grew to be inappropriate when the Boston slogan “Boston Strong” arose during the Red Sox’s World Series to support the city after the tragic bombings.

The company reacted quickly, removed the branded strategy and quelled discussion that it was an attempt to “piggyback” off of the uniting slogan. The initial response came from a reddit thread, and Chevy’s swift decision to pull their branded content that used the “strong” slogan was the right call. Diving into the social media responses, we can see how the general public responded to the duplicative nature of the names. Leveraging social allows brands like Chevy to react and engage social users to “take back” their key messaging and brand discussions.

By using a social insights platform, advertisers can monitors in real-time the issues with their advertisements and audiences, removing negative ads and responding swiftly with an apology. When crises do occur, this is also a space to monitor the long-term effects of the ad strategy on the larger brand as a whole.

4. Live baseball vs. fantasy baseball demographic breakdown

The amount of data and insights that can be acquired through social analytics is vast, but the numerous uses for all of that data is what is important. Using social insights to understand your audience, and then applying those insights to tangible marketing and advertising strategies is the ultimate goal. This can be done in a variety of ways, whether it be identifying new target markets or discovering effective marketing time slots, social insights can inform many different types of decisions.

Both baseball and the World Series have an aging audience, along with a declining viewership. The majority of baseball viewers, about 40%, are 35 and older. The only way to stifle declining interest in the World Series would be to appeal to a larger and younger audience which isn’t the simplest thing to do. Identifying and targeting a new audience is an extremely complicated process, and actually reaching that audience another hurdle altogether. Social media insights have the ability to make that process much easier.

By examining similar markets and common interests, social media insights provide the ability to find a market that is closely related to baseball, and has a younger demographic: Fantasy Baseball.

These two markets are separate enough to have different audiences, but similar enough to have many overlapping interests. Using social media analytics, we can compare the two social conversations surrounding these markets to see where their interests intersect.

There are many areas involving sports where the two markets intersect, which are to be expected, but we can also see some interesting areas for exploration. “Video games” could help advertisers and team marketers dive into more targeted marketing of their games, in addition to possible World Series integration. “Celebrities” could help give clues to possible sponsorships. Fitness could help spark an entire campaign integrating baseball into a fit lifestyle. There are many additional possibilities that could resonate with targeted audiences, and marketers, owners, team managers, and other baseball aficionados.

The value of social insights for analyzing Major League Baseball discussion

Consumer insights analysis has become a leading strategy for top global brands. Real-time monitoring, and audience insights make the difference for truly connecting to our industry fans.

The difference of using social data compared to other forms of statistical or algorithmic analyses is the value of pulling information straight from the unbiased fan discussions. Social insights continue to be the largest source of unsolicited consumer opinion in the world, allowing brand managers, PR teams, and marketing strategists to understand more about connecting and resonating messages with their fanbase. Social insights are unique in this way, and could be a key resource to build new outreach and demographic interest for America’s favorite pastime.