While some sports marketers have gotten to first base with Twitter, no one has been able to drive it home yet. Still, Twitter is a hit in the sports community thanks to the microblogging site's ability to engage and inform in real-time.
While it has yet to be used widely to drive sales conversions, Twitter's potential to provide brand and product insights and its ability to add interactivity to other media channels, such as television, print and e-mail, makes it increasingly difficult for direct marketers to ignore it when launching a campaign.
Because Twitter is an open application programming interface (API), marketers can scrape Twitter feeds for data, said Jason Inasi, president at Miami-based The Factory Interactive. “Twitter as a data mining, predictive trending tool is amazing because you can do stuff in real-time,” Inasi said.
The social media site has amassed a large crowd — a total of 9.3 million members as of March — but for sports marketing, the real appeal is the synergy in purpose.
“Sports is fun. Twitter is fun,” said David Smith, president at Steiner Sports Direct. The question is how to leverage Twitter to make it fun for fans, he added.
Last week, the NBA's Phoenix Suns franchise ran a TV broadcast ad during the last game of the regular season soliciting for Facebook and Twitter followers, promising 500 prize giveaways to new users. The trend began last year when several well-known athletes led the way into this emerging media, and quickly discovered loyal fans were thrilled to connect with the sometimes hard-to-reach celebrities.
Source : DMNews
