Instagram Broadcast Channels, the future of social media, and the State Of Football Social Media 2025 survey begins

This year's State of Football Social Media survey is now open! If you manage a social media account for a club, national side, or league, I'd appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to let me know about your club's social media marketing. All entries are anonymous.

This is the fifth consecutive year I've ran the survey, and with every passing year it gets more interesting to compare how the results are changing. The survey is the same as ever, for the most part, but I have added in Bluesky as an option to a few of the questions to bring it a bit more up to date.

Instagram Broadcast Channels add interactivity

One of my previous criticisms of Instagram's Broadcast Channels was the lack of interactivity. Emoji reactions and polls are great, but I always thought it would be useful to be able to open up a brief window for comments that you can use for inspiration or to respond to.

The new prompt card does this.

In this example, NYCFC are asking fans what they want to see more of and responding accordingly. People can see the comments left to the prompt and leave emoji reactions against them, which would be used like a voting system.

I like the NYCFC approach to naming theirs as a "behind the scenes" feed. It makes it feel like you're getting an exclusive look inside the club. But I don't like that background as it makes white text hard to read. Don't forget accessibility when choosing things like this.

How to create a content strategy

Newcastle United's recently appointed head of content Simon Meehan, formerly of Brentford and Chelsea, knows a thing or two about leading teams to create engaging content. I featured one such example of their website content in 2023 when writing an ode to the long read.

Earlier this year Simon took part in a webinar with Sports Business Institute Barcelona to talk all things content strategy. I would definitely recommend catching up on the recording if you want to find out more about how content can help teams win off the field.

In this talk you'll hear Simon talk about concepts such as sales funnels and customer journeys. I plan to write a few things about these over the coming weeks and add my own perspective on them.

The future of social media

The Athletic's Steve Madeley has written about how players are moving away from X, and why clubs can't tear themselves away from it just yet.

There's no denying that the landscape is changing. The bulk of the people I speak to in the sport don't enjoy being on X due to the negativity and declining experience, yet can't deny that it's where the eyeballs are. One of the first lessons in marketing is that you should be where your customers are, so I don't envisage teams moving away en masse just yet.

If you are thinking about jumping to an alternative like Bluesky, whether that's instead of or alongside your presence on X, I've started compiling a list of official English team accounts I've found there. You can follow it to see how it's being used before deciding whether to join. No doubt I'm missing a few, but I do keep a regular eye out and update it.

One of the things picked up on in the Athletic piece above is that teams rely on X for directing people to their website. Some experiments in other sectors have found that Bluesky is a better source of referral traffic, even on smaller followings, because it doesn't actively reduce the reach of posts containing links.

The article also makes mention of platforms such as reddit and Discord. Both are still hugely underused in sport. Blackburn Rovers' subreddit, to pluck a random one by way of an example, has 2,000 subscribers and is in the top 16% as a result. There's a pre-engaged audience there that would no doubt welcome some form of official involvement.

Speaking of alternative social networks, if you're interested in a short guide on how to set up and use Threads then Meta have you covered. And Snapchat (remember Snapchat!) have published some research into how sports fans use their platform.

Maximising the Instagram algorithm

While I've never been a huge fan of trying to "play the algorithm", it's impossible to deny that knowing how social media sites rank content is useful. Luckily, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has you covered.

The three key factors are:

• Watch time.
• Likes.
• Sends.

Essentially, if something triggers people to do something then it fuels the algorithm. If a lot of people click like, Instagram shows that content to more people.

For teams, this means that content strategies should revolve around creating posts that people are going to want to watch, like, and forward to their friends. Focus on providing insights that inform, educate, or entertain your fans. This is likely why ticket offers and merchandise sales don't perform as well as everything else.

Mosseri also talks about adding audio to everything - even photos - and keeping videos under three minutes. Posting to your grid is the recommended way to maximise your reach, as Stories are intended for "your most passionate audience".

You can watch the series of videos on Mosseri's Instagram account.