Evolution of social media, Jessica Ivers

In this Sports Geek Throwback episode, Sean Callanan interviews Jessica Ivers from episode 276, from Tennis Australia at the time of the interview, she is now the Marketing and Communications Coordinator at Melbourne Sports Centres

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Key Takeaways

In this Sports Geek Throwback, the discussion delves into the evolution of social media

The conversation explores how social media platforms have drastically changed, offering more opportunities for sports organizations to connect with fans.
Jessica discusses the shift from primarily text-based content to more visual and engaging content, such as videos and interactive posts.
They examine the rise of new social media platforms like TikTok and how they're being used in the sports industry.
The importance of understanding and utilizing the unique features of each social media platform is emphasized.
Jessica shares insights into the challenges and opportunities presented by the evolving social media landscape

Throwback Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited by AI

Sean: And it's the same for that tone and conversation. Like you said, it works for certain tournaments or certain brands or certain sub-accounts that can't be on the premium account. One thing I did want to talk to you about was how social has grown. Early on, it was all about engagement, but as it got more global and as the size of the audiences got bigger, engagement was getting hard, it was getting harder and harder.

Jessica: Yeah, I know I was actually doing a bit of a deep search on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, trying to find some from a little campaign I did at the Bulldogs with the dog box, which is a social media activity where we'd choose a couple of people each week and they come and sit and watch the games in this little dog box.

Sean: It was a coaches' box, it was a corporate box. You weren't putting them in an actual dog box. No, it wasn't

Jessica: It wasn't. I think about it, that was probably the initial influencer marketing that it wasn't known as then.

Sean: Exactly.

Jessica: Yeah. And so I was doing a bit of a search through, and that was how we'd announced. The winners of the dog box for that week, we'd tweet them. And then if we hadn't heard back from most of them would reply really quickly. If we hadn't, we were like, you should check your inbox. There's an email waiting for you there. And it's like, Oh, I forgot that that was how carefree social used to be that you could be like that on your channels. Whereas now it's a lot more slick, I guess. And a lot more less so much about the fan engagement side of things via social.

Sean: But yeah, it's less social, like for a lot of sports, the social media channels and Twitter in particular has become more broadcast. Like it's, here's our stuff and partly it's behavior, partly it's the way the platforms have pushed it and sort of, you know, Facebook's the same, Instagram stories are the same, like, Hey, consume our content has become more, more broadcast.

Jessica: It definitely has, it has shifted a little. You know, a little bit there has, I think teams are by and large pulling back from this Twitter engagement. Early on it was like, we're doing so much stuff on Twitter, but we're not seeing the traffic returns or the engagement returns for that effort. Right. Like the, you know, Oh, someone, you know, asks a question about where should I claim my tickets at Australian Open? Right. And someone's meant to respond. Then there's expectation, you know, the customer service base. So it became so massive.