Social Media and My Amazing(?) Return to Fantasy Football

For 10 years, I avoided fantasy football. 

Every few seasons, my friends would ask me to play in their leagues and I would decline, citing family and work responsibilities. These excuses were valid, of course, but I could have definitely fit it in. After all, I always found the time to blog, hit the gym, play pickup basketball, and watch A LOT of “Rock of Love” featuring “Poison” lead singer Brett Michaels. 

But this year, I finally caved and joined the league run by my wife’s family.

This decision—and how the season played out—shares many common threads with my social media work. And, in this post, I’ll explore some them.

The Beginning

One of the reasons I resisted fantasy football—besides, as my wife would often say, “It’s not real!”—is that I didn’t know much about the NFL and its players beyond Tom Brady and the Patriots. If I participated, I assumed I’d need to be well-versed in the game, understanding who was good and worth drafting and who I should pass on. Honestly, I didn’t want to do the research legwork for something that is, at its core, make believe.

But then I came across the ESPN Fantasy Football site, which the family was using for their league. The site makes the process—from drafting players to trading them—incredibly easy and, most importantly, there’s a lot of automation. This automation allows the user to see who the best players are at each position—based on statistics from the previous year—and who is available before and after the draft. This made everything so much easier for a rank amateur like me.

Automated tools are incredibly important to my work for the Harvard Business School (HBS) Office of Alumni Relations. For example, I use Spredfast, a social media platform, to schedule posts and run analytics. I’m able to plan campaigns months in advance and get relevant data almost instantaneously. I’m not sure what I’d do without the latter since access to comprehensive social media data is essential. 

Another automated tool I use is Hype Type. This app, which the last time I checked was still free, allows users to drop in a photo and some text to make short videos. I use Hype Type at least three times a week to share alumni highlights...

Special birthday messages...

And other fun content.

From fantasy football to social media, the right type of automation makes all the difference.

A Tale of Two Seasons (Part 1)

My season got off to a great start. After winning my first five games, I was standing at the top of my division. 

Was it because of my great drafting? No.

Was it because one or two players performed above expectations? No.

It all came down to defense, specifically that of the New England Patriots.

Each squad in our league was required to pick a team on the defensive side of the ball. Since I’m a New England native AND a complete homer, I chose the Patriots. 

It was a prescient decision.

Through the first five games, the Patriots defensive was historically good, holding opposing teams to an average of 7 points per game. 

And, for me, this translated into an extra 20 points a game, often the difference between a victory and a loss. 

From a social media perspective, my decision to go "all in" on the Instagram stories poll feature—like I did with the Patriots defense in fantasy football—has made a huge difference to my work, resulting in an exponential increase in my social media engagement. A few times a month, I pose a question to my audience—for example, “what was the biggest business story of 2019?” or "what is your favorite #WinteratHBS photo from 2019?”-–and ask them to vote on a series of options, anywhere from 10 to 20 in total. I then determine which voters are alumni and then add this information to my data set. This approach has paid off and, as of last month, my alumni engagement was 30% higher than it was at the same time last year (22,351 to 28,923).

A Tale of Two Seasons (Part 2)

And then I started losing...a lot. 

I went 2-7 over my last nine games, barely finishing with a .500 winning percentage for the season. Granted, many of these contests were close, but I still seemed to lose each and every week. 

One game in particular illustrated my downfall and has a lot to do with social media decision-making more generally. 

During the last few weeks of the regular season, I had a choice to make—I could start Matt Ryan or Drew Brees. Both players were coming off decent games, so I rolled the dice and went with Ryan, figuring that he would be facing a weaker defense and, thus, would have a better day in the air. 

This was a REALLY bad decision. 

Matt Ryan had an okay game (20 points), while Brees was otherworldly (checking in with 40 points on 5 touchdown passes). What made this decision sting even more was that I lost the game by less than a point 75.9 to 75. 

Making the right decisions is an essential part of my social media work. But unlike my fantasy football experience, I take a vastly different approach. When I was choosing between Ryan and Brees, it took me literally five minutes to make my decision.  

On the other hand, when I’m launching a social media campaign, I think about the proper approach for quite some time. The decisions I make are based on past experience, data, and, at times, my gut. 

A recent example of this was the outreach I did on behalf of the alumni office for our latest Skydeck podcast segment. The segment, titled “Making the Case for Funding Female Founders,” focused on one alumna’s work on behalf of female entrepreneurs who graduated from HBS. After listening to the segment a few times, I came up with the following plan.

Instagram: Post photo and link on Instagram stories.

Facebook: Share the segment on our alumni page and group page.

But the most nuanced planning was for Twitter. Relying on the data I have collected over the past 7 years, I sent a series of tweets, scheduled at two-hour intervals, to alumnae interested in the following areas:

Entrepreneurship

Startups

Venture Capital

Here's an example of one tweet which was part of this campaign.

And this approach—and others like it—have paid off. This specific Twitter outreach led to 223 clickthroughs and responses like this.

Of course, not all of my decisions on social media pay off. But I try to make the best, most informed choices I can, unlike the rudimentary way I approach something like fantasy football. 

And I’ll soon have another decision to make: to play or not to play fantasy football next year. If I do lace up my virtual cleats one more time and am faced with another decision on which quarterback to start, I’ll just flip a coin.

I’d rather rely on luck than my suspect fantasy football decision-making.

 Was this post helpful? Was there anything that I missed? Please leave any feedback you have in the comments section below.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS.

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