Thanks for joining me! I’ll be taking a close look at the development of social media with a close look at Edinburgh rugby  a professional rugby club that competes in the Pro 14 Rugby championship and the way in which they connect with fans.

Edinburgh Rugby has had some quality engaging social media posts and have utilised the transition from traditional media techniques to new media.  Edinburgh Rugby is a club on the rise on the pitch and off it! http://www.edinburghrugby.org/

 

So the question I will be looking at is how engaging is Edinburgh’s new marketing methods?

This week Edinburgh Rugby have been using their initiative when it comes to sports media and have utilised the development of new media in engaging their fans including myself.

There is now a more focused approach on how sports clubs utilise social media to drive engagement and value for corporate partners (Hurst and Plastiras, 2017). After undergoing rebranding at the start of the season to make Edinburgh Rugby more digitally marketable, the club has not stopped producing quality marketing material aimed at engaging their fans through social media.

One of particular interest to me is their new marketing hashtag MagicMonday. Which has recently gone down a success in the club and has kept fans on edge. The reason it was so engaging is that fans could try and guess the players from the outlines of the photo shown below… making the post interactive.  Social media sites offer a chance for for fans to create a bond with the team and therefore strengthen the commercial and brand value (Parganas, Anagnostopouslous, & Chadwick, 2017). With allowing fans to guess the players it created a huge talking point between fans increasing their engagement by using a challenge to try and test how well they know what players look like. 

As a fan of Edinburgh rugby this was especially intrigued by this as it meant 5 new singings would take place in the club bringing me to their social media channels 7 times during the day just to check if the next player had been announced. With that said social media have been increasingly used by sports organisations to communicate with the public (Wang & Zhou 2015). This communication tool from Edinburgh also created a major talking point as a key aim of theirs was to try and sell as many tickets to their first home European quarter final game in over 10 years. 5 days after magic Monday took place

Fans are becoming more engaged with the development of new media strategies.  One reason this is happening is due to the outcome of games being accessed across multiple media formats.  (Gantz and Lewis, 2017). Once again this can be said with Edinburgh Rugby So as well as the new singings getting announced acreoss the diffeirng platforms fans have the option to choose between differing platforms so that no one misses out on any of the news.

The availability of differing means of media is allowing sports fans to follow the game closely and to some fans can be described as a better experience than going to the game

Its not just in rugby that the development of media strategies is providing really beneficial to the engagement of the viewers as Racing sports are developing their technology offering new perspectives for the viewers allowing audiences to simultaneously follow different angles (Davila & Foster, 2016). This is also backed up by the saying that “Digital technology has allowed for sports media to go into a new dimension” (Lefever, 2012:14). This new era is critical to the sports fan as differing organisations and teams like Edinburgh are having to be creative in getting their fans engaged.

References:

Coakley, J. and Pike, E. (2014) Sports in society: Issues and controversies. 2nd Ed. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hil

Hoye, R., Smith, A.C.T., Nicholson, M., Stewart, B. and Westerbeek, H. (2012) Sport Management, Principles and Practices. (3rd ed.) London: Routledge.

Da Silva, E.C. and Las Casas, A.L. (2017) Sports fans as consumers: An approach to sports marketing. British Journal of Marketing Studies. 5, (4), pp. 36-48.

Davila, A. and Foster, G. (2016) Technology and Innovation. In: Byers, T. (ed). Contemporary Issues in Sport Management – A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. pp. 35-44.

Parganas, P., Anagnostopouslous, C. and Chadwick, S. (2017: 150) Effects of social media interactions on brand associations A comparative study of soccer fan clubs. International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 18, (2), pp. 149-165.