Social Media Leaders Hold a Treasure Trove of Insights That Can Help the Entire Team Thrive

I remember this epiphany like it was yesterday. A moment of clarity when it hit me just how much information was at my fingertips as the team's social media manager.

There is insight into how fans feel about a player, a trade, or free agent signing. Intel about what fans think of a brand campaign, a promotion, and the in-game experience. And there is even indispensable info in the thousands of comments and replies about how fans feel about the content, the creative, the copy, and the community.

It is here in the deluge of daily fan exposure and engagement where strategy lives. It's an interconnected flywheel — the more the social media team understands what resonates with fans, the better they can drive fan engagement and further the goals of every department. And pass on those informative nuggets to the rest of the team. This is what Kyle Benzion thinks about every day in his role as Director of Social Strategy for the Orlando Magic. Just about everything runs through social media and Benzion recognizes the responsibility that carries, not just in execution but in actionable insights.

“I felt like everything runs through social and we were kind of the center of the spider web," said Benzion, talking about the Atlanta Falcons NFL team, where he spent over five years working in social. "And at the other side of that, it's up to us if things aren't working well. You have to look back, too,...and understand analytics and research and numbers, and then get that back to the people creating the content. They need to understand what tweaks they need to make and how we ultimately [get] better...

“I quickly learned, under Dan [Gadd’s] leadership, of the importance of understanding analytics and communicating it back to the team."

When it comes to interpreting data for the creative output of the social media team, it's easy to get seduced by the scoreboard. Chasing the successful tactics and strategies executed by other teams and brands, or playing the vanity metrics game seems sensible. And all that can be a source of information.

But the goal of social media isn't about driving engagement, it's about engaging fans. There is so much creativity on these teams, but strategy informs creativity and brings a method to the madness, taking into account prior performance, audience targeted, and so much more that has been part of the maturation of social media and content over the last decade.

“All the time people say, 'Hey I have an idea' [during] a brainstorm...And instead of saying, Hey, I have an idea, what I'm gonna say back to you is, like, how do you know your idea's gonna work?" said Benzion. Say 'I have an idea' based off of what I know that's going to work and the research I've done about our fan base...I have an idea based off of that.'

"I think all the time people jump straight to brainstorming — it's like, wait wait wait, just because you have an idea, doesn't mean it's gonna work. Let's do our research to make sure we're brainstorming on the right things.”?

Backed with even the best research and understanding, every team and brand and, heck, every user on social media grapples with the same problem — it's crowded out there. There is a lot of content. And a lot of volume from individual accounts, particularly in sports. It starts to blend in, unable to stop users' scroll. Attention is the scarce commodity; this is Seth Godin's 'purple cow' philosophy at play in the social media and sports world. You have to earn attention, you have to stand out — that's a foundational principle for Benzion and his strategic perspective.

"You gotta ask the question of — what we're saying on social, the content that we're trying to put out, why is someone gonna stop and look at this and give it more than one second of attention and then scroll right by it? " he asked. "So I think it's a battle for attention. That's what social media is right now, it's a battle for attention, and so what can we do to be different, stand out and not be cookie-cutter?"

Browse your social media feeds and you can see this battle for attention play out every day. Teams used to stick to information only, and many largely still do. But in an age of omnipresent media and infinite scrolls of content, fans simply have too many better options to give teams attention simply because they're the official arbiter of info. That's not good enough anymore (if it ever was). Benzion has seen a gradual evolution in the sports industry and beyond, as veterans in the space accustomed to official press releases are slowly coming to realize that it's not just okay but encouraged to tell stories and present information in different ways.

"It’s so different organization to organization and I think it's gonna change a lot as this younger generation become people in the C-suite who understand social and digital a little bit more and understand that it is entertainment," said Benzion, reflecting on the comfort level of teams to lead with risk-taking and fun. "It is official team news, but it also is entertainment. It has to act as entertainment...?

"As the younger generation moves into that C-suite, I think you're gonna see changes here in the next few years or several years in the sense of freedom and expression, and, honestly, just moving digital from a news-based view to entertainment.”

Part of the maturation of social media and the greater embrace of its importance to the business has been understanding how that attention leads to tangible (and intangible) value. But social doesn't fit into the paradigms of years past — whether primarily speculative ROI like billboards and TV spots to the precisely measured return of digital ads and promo codes. The best social media doesn't ask for a sale, it elicits emotion. It inspires visceral connections more than instant transactions. There is little doubt those connections and emotions lead to ticket purchases, merch sales, engagement with sponsors and sponsored content, and all those other things that affect the bottom line. The point isn't to drive more last clicks from organic social media, though, it's to move fans further down the funnel to where they are doing some or all of those aforementioned monetizable activities.

With that perspective, it's incumbent on those like Benzion and his colleagues to help tell that story, look at the right data, and understand how engagement fits in the big picture.

"He's really good at finding different ways to lure people in to be a part of the process, even if it's the start of the process," said Benzion, talking about his boss at the Falcons, Dan Gadd. "You want engaging content or sweepstakes or emotional videos that they're gonna get people to feel in that moment, like, 'Oh, I care about the Falcons. I want to be there.' And then all you gotta do is give us your name and email.

"That was our job to get those leads; to your point, digital wasn't necessarily driving all the ticket sales, we were driving leads and we were trying to drive the right leads to get those sales."

Because social media is for many fans and potential fans the primary, most frequent touchpoint, it is where so much insight is captured about that all-encompassing question — what moves the needle? And the answers to this question hold immense value for every department on the team. You want to talk about ROI? A social media team, backed with data analysis, delivers value in droves by those insights alone. Social media pros are skilled storytellers, it's almost a prerequisite in a field where content leads. But they must be just as good at converting the lessons they learn every day into actionable storytelling for the rest of the team. Communicator is the most important job Benzion has now.

"I want to make sure the analysis and data that I'm doing to help our social team — a lot of that can cross over in some way or form to those other departments," he said. "So my view is if I'm doing all this analytics and data capture, I might as well share it with everybody that can find the impact...

“You have to be a great communicator as you kind of move up and I've learned that and it’s really important.”

One of Benzion's guiding principles when it comes to social is understanding why fans care. Why are they going to care about this content or this story? There is gold in that answer and the organizations that realize that value and have it permeate throughout are the ones that succeed at all levels. Every post, comment, and share is a learning opportunity, and we've only just begun to bear the fruit.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH KYLE BENZION