Beyond a Billion "Likes": Creating Fan-Centric Social Engagement

A billion likes.  That’s a big social media achievement by the NBA, which announced last week that the league had generated more than a billion followers across its collective social media accounts.  LeBron James alone has more than 66 million followers!

The scale of these numbers is dazzling, but creating next-level social engagement with fans (aka your audience) goes beyond building a mass quantity of “likes” and “follows.”  It goes beyond pushing out content through social channels.  It goes beyond you.  Putting the fan at the center provides an opportunity to create a broader relationship, beyond social platforms, that encourages a much deeper level of interactivity. I call it “fanatic engagement.”

At Daily Racing Form, we’re building a model of “fanatic engagement” that mixes content, commerce and social channels.  By putting the fan at the center of everything we do, it's transformed our relationship with our audience and how we serve them.   How can you create fanatic engagement with your audience? Here are 4 ways we’re doing it:

1. Create a consumer mission.  Rather than thinking of ourselves as a publishing authority, we made it our mission to understand what our racing fans need, helping them to play better and smarter, and have more fun doing it. Player development, not content distribution, is the basis of our content and social marketing, with free webinars featuring our top talent and Twitter feeds where we share data and important trends. Imagine LeBron James teaching you his shooting techniques. That’s essentially what we do. 
2. Re-think content as a service. We changed our content model to match up with fan behavior, which is heavily weighted to weekends and most intense in the minutes leading up to race time.  This meant re-thinking staff schedules to cover the weekend and creating an entirely new form of real-time content, reported straight from the track.  This real-time stream, called DRF Live, is now complemented by a 4-hour live video broadcast from our studio every Saturday, where we literally play through the day with our audience. 
3. Build interaction through competition. As racing moves more online (it’s the only legal form of online sports wagering in the U.S.), the social nature of the sport can get lost. We’re re-instilling this through online and live tournament play, where players compete for a berth to  live championship events with millions of dollars at stake. We give fans the chance to interact with each other and our brand, and to have fun doing it, creating a deeper bond and stronger loyalty along the way.  
4. Celebrate fans as key members of the racing community.  The covers of the Daily Racing Form have been graced by many a great horse, jockey and trainer over the past 121 years, but for the first time this year, we did something different:  We put a horseplayer on the cover.  And we’ve brought players and fans into every aspect of what we do -- campaigns promoting them as aspirational figures, articles, video, webinars, podcasts and other content where they’re regularly featured, and via social channels where we engage them and seek their opinions.

A billion “likes” is pretty cool.  But for us, “social” is not just about quantity and far more than a distribution and promotional channel.  It’s a way to develop our audience’s skills, bring them together, and celebrate them as key members of the racing community. That’s the basis for creating fanatic engagement, and a road map for publishers trying to increase relevancy and expand their businesses in a digital world.