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How To Reach Sports Fans On Twitter - Live

Consumers sent over 13 million Super Bowl-related tweets during the Big Game this year -- compared to fewer than 2 million last year -- cementing a fact that every marketer suspected: people are increasingly using Twitter on their mobile devices, tablets, and laptops to interact with friends near and far during major televised sporting events. Twitter has enabled armchair quarterbacks worldwide to transform “watching the game” into a social experience.

“Instead of telling my friends next to me, ‘I can’t believe he called that timeout,’ now I can tell 2,000 followers,” said one sports fan in a recent article.

Whether it’s the Super Bowl, March Madness, The Olympics, or the World Cup, Twitter has become the virtual stadium, living room, and sports bar combined -- allowing viewers to chat with friends and fellow fans during the game. Twitter also adds a new dimension to real-time sports events, providing fans with real-time commentary on every dramatic twist or stellar play as it happens.

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With so many engaged fans on Twitter, brands are obviously eager to use the social stream to connect with them during live sporting events. Twitter has become the de facto “second screen” for real-time sporting events, and brands realize it’s the next step in aligning their brand with a sporting event and tapping into fans’ fervor.

First marketers had stadium signage, then radio, TV, Internet, and finally Twitter and other social feeds -- each time bringing their brand closer to the fan’s personal experience of the game.

Despite the promise of Twitter as a real-time marketing channel during sporting events, many brands still struggle with how to get their messages heard by fans amid a firestorm of tweets. With everyone shouting at once, how can a brand insert itself into the Twitter conversation in an authentic, memorable way?

Many brands are now buying paid media ads that appear at the top of Twitter streams to ensure their brand messages don’t get lost in the shuffle…but the trick is to make sure these ads can be optimized on the fly to reflect what’s going on in the game. (Fans sent 12,000 tweets per second during the Super Bowl, so any paid advertising effort on Twitter must be optimizable in real-time to take advantage of constantly shifting conversations.)

Here are three ways to use paid media to reach engaged fans on Twitter during a sporting event:  

1. Target super-engagers. Make sure your paid media campaigns during a real-time sporting event targets the super-fans who actively tweet and retweet and have thousands of followers. By targeting your campaigns to these super fans, they will in turn share with their followers -- spreading your campaign for you.

2.  Link to the ‘second screen.’  Extend TV commercials and paid video campaigns to Twitter by launching a social ad campaign targeting viewers of a particular sporting event. Ensure a continuous message from screen to screen, so paid Twitter ads reflect and extend on the commercials and video you run before and during the game.

      3.  Own an event. Go all out and target your campaign to a mega-audience during a key event. For example, Chevrolet spent big to target all Twitter users following @superbowl and @nfl for 48 hours. As a result of this “play big” strategy, Chevrolet emerged as the Social Media Brand Champion of the 2012 Super Bowl, attaining the highest mindshare on social media of all the brands that advertised during the game.

        Live sporting events are a unique opportunity for brand marketers to engage directly with core demographics while they’re excited, amped up, and plugged into one of their favorite activities. And Twitter is the perfect social stream to connect with fans in real-time. With a little ingenuity and some strategic paid advertising, marketers can connect with fans on Twitter during the game to build long-lasting brand recall and affinity.

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