With over 318 different and diverse social media profiles, which include and even more diverse profile of posts utilizing pictures, videos, infographics and advertisements, Nike is the top of the industry in sports social media marketing (unmetric.com). Today's social media landscape and audience is tricky to grasp. The clickbait and instant information society we live in makes it difficult for many companies to truly capture the attention of those consuming their content. Audiences today need jaw dropping headlines and short, to the point posts that contain content that is exactly what they are looking to read. Nike has successfully captured our attention in several ways. One way is taking controversy by the horns and running with it (Forbes.com). Another few are focusing on quality over quantity, utilizing their athlete sponsorships as influencers, and creating engaging content all across the board. In this post I will explain in depth how these strategies have paid off for the sports apparel mega-brand.Embracing Controversy
Nike has become more popular thanks to several controversial issues they decided to tackle, specifically their backing of Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick is an "exiled" NFL football player who decided to take a knee during the national anthem several times throughout the 2016 season, and is now out of a job. They used Kaepernick to relaunch a Just Do It campaign centered around the quote "Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything" (Nike Twitter, Forbes.com). It was jumpstarted with a two minute advertisement featuring minority, disabled, and gender role influenced athletes excelling at their sport, with Kaepernick in the background offering encouraging words. The world saw this compelling campaign by Nike, and mentions of Nike and engagement with their tweets skyrocketed. The new core demographic Nike has begun to target of young urban consumers ate up the campaign, while some mocked it. It is apparent that Nike targeted a younger audience for their campaign, which Forbes projected would continue to engage with and interact about the most.
Quality over Quantity
Unmetric.com analyzed Nike's main social media accounts on the mainstream platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube) over the course of a year to understand better how the megabrand utilizes social media. When it came to their Facebook, that is where they utilized quality over quantity heavily. On their Facebook throughout the calendar year 2017, Nike posted an average of four times a month. They showed no true schedule, rather only posted when topical. Their posts came during a running of one of their campaigns, or during a large scale sporting event in which they had a stake, whether a sponsor athlete involved or their name on the event somehow. Keeping the posts spread out is an incredible way to ensure your audience is engaged. Social media users don't like to be bombarded, and Nike adopted that. In 2012 the company posted 836 times, and realized this new trend, and in 2015 posted 28 times.
Using Influencers
Nike recognizes that athletes are heroes to today's world. People aspire to be like their favorite athletes, so Nike uses their athletes as inspiration for their content consumers. They have sponsorships throughout all sports, and their sponsorship profile is incredibly diverse. This creates a trustworthy feeling coming from the company, because the more athletes they showcase the more people are going to follow the company on social media. The more people see their favorite athlete (which is increased with a mass amount of sponsorships) the more engaging the posts become. Nike has emplored baseball, basketball, football, and all different sports players of all different races and genders to be spokespeople for them. Not only is Nike posting about these athletes, but these athletes are posting about Nike and Nike campaigns, which drives engagement and interaction.
Nike has set the standard for how to run a social media portfolio. If companies take even one page out of the Nike handbook, they will see a large increase in their social media success
3 comments:
I really like the points that you made throughout this post. I agree that Nike has very influential social media campaigns that have the ability to greatly impact all of its consumers. All of Nike's campaigns are extremely powerful and memorable. I think it's very important that Nike values the quality of the content over that is posted rather than how active they are. I believe that this tactic works very for Nike because of the impact that many of its social media campaigns like the one featuring Colin Kaepernick. I also agree with your point that because of the influencers Nike uses are viewed as role models by its target audience, people are more inclined to engage with the posts.
Nike has definitely continued to market themselves in an efficient and really smart way. Specifically, like you mentioned with controversy Nike has done a good job of catering to their targeted audience while, at the same, pleasing their own athletes. With thee Colin Kaepernick ad campaign, I thought it was great how Nike stood up and believed in Kaepernick despite much of the corporate world turning against him. At the very least, the advertisement grew extreme publicity for Nike and was extremely popular among many of their targeted audience: which is young athletes, many of which support Kaepernick's movement, as well as was supported by many of the athletes that Nike sponsors and hopes to sponsor. Nike may have lost some supporters who are very highly against Kaepernick, but in the end, I believe that the advertisement really sat well with the majority of Nike's consumers and those who really matter to Nike: Their targeted audience and those who they sponsor.
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