Let’s Play Ball - Social Baseball to Supercharge Your Social

Hear me out. The world as we know it has changed a lot in 2020. In fact, these days it’s how we know we’re alive because change is flying at us at rates greater than a fastball.

With all this change, brands and advertisers are having to rethink their playbook and create a new roster of content that is mindful of all these changes or risk a strikeout. (I know, cool it with the puns.) Got it.

That also means it’s a perfect time to consider a simple framework for evaluating success. Sure, you can look at success through the lens of an entire season (the social equivalent of an entire year) or you can look at it game-by-game (the social equivalent of day-by-day). Let’s take our best swing at today’s content, watch the tapes back tomorrow morning and see if we can’t put a win on the board for our social efforts.

Baseball games are not won or lost on a single player, one pitch or by having every batter step up to the mount, swing and hit a home run let alone a grand slam. Yet, for some reason in social – that’s exactly the pressure on content producers. Every post must be a grand slam; knock it out of the park. The good news is I am here to offer you the simple steps to making that happen.

First, decide what metric and/or platform you are going to focus on against your total post volume. Let’s say you decide Facebook is going to be the focus and you want to focus on amplification (Shares). Got it.

Next, let’s set a benchmark for your daily post volume. In other words, how many batters do we want to bring to the plate and try to help us win the day on social? You might consider how many you normally do and compare that to your competitors and/or even the broader vertical that you reside in as a team, brand, advertiser, publisher, etc.

Based on this information around the KPI you’ve chosen, define what you constitute as a single, double, triple, home run, and grand slam. I might suggest that your singles be just slightly below the average for your competitors/benchmarked social handles. Remember, not everything is going to be knocked out of the ballpark. Doubles should be, therefore, slightly higher than that average…so on and so forth.

How many of each should we expect every day? I’d suggest starting with 40% of the posts being singles, 30% being doubles, 20% being triples and 10% being a home run or grand slam.

At this point, you should be able to add up the total number of posts in each of the categorizations and see what that will equal as a total for the day. When you’re starting out, it’s apt to be higher than what you’re doing now but lower than your top competitor (and that’s ok). Sometimes you need a season to get the right players coached and ready for the pennant push before you go win the World Series.

Some basic rules for this daily diamond game we call Social Baseball

• Every morning look at all the content opportunities that are available for that given day and assign it a value…single, double, triple, home run, or grand slam?
• Remember, you’re a team, so allow any staffer the ability to make a prediction on the story for the day.
• If you’re heavy on singles, have conversations about whether you have ideas to lift a few to make them doubles (add video, create a custom graphic, turn it into a meme, adjust the text copy, reframe it? Add a call to action)
• For the home runs and grand slams, make sure you position them in your daily lineup in the right spot. If they are our best story, we want to make sure we post it at the right hour of the day – the one when we are apt to get the best engagement.
• If a story dies, it should be replaced with a similar or higher bat story (so keep a bullpen of stories warmed up).
• The next day, spend 5-10 mins reviewing tape…err…the social performance. If it misses your prediction, consider the possible reasons: Did we write it in such a way that we missed the mark with our audience? Did we have a call to action? Was it the right one? Did it feel forced? Did we miss posting it in a hot zone? Did it lack visual appeal? If your team’s predictions are correct, you should supercharge your social and achieve your foal for the day/week/month.
• The best part is – you can keep track of everyone’s batting average at predicting what will do well and use these as social leaders to help break internal roadblocks around what to post when to post and how to post. These conversations will not only help build one team, but they’ll also teach others how to follow in that success – making you a World Series Social Champion.
• I wouldn’t be a good coach…nor would this be an article from a social media company if I didn’t have some stats in it, right?

Consider this…as of Opening Day 2020 (even with Covid-19 and the delay of the baseball season), Major League Baseball teams had their content shared/retweeted 6.8M times across Facebook and Instagram. The video content from these teams was viewed more than 558M times on Facebook and another 23M on Twitter. Yes, that’s down from the same time in 2019 – but it’s also incredible when you consider that 2020 had those numbers at a time when the season had not even been played yet.

If you found this insightful to your team, I’d love to stay social & connected with you. Feel free to contact us.