Where do athletes traditionally receive motivation to perform at their best on the hardwood, inside the Octagon or on the gridiron?
Chances are that you did not answer from fans’ social posts inside their respective locker rooms; that’s because it has never happened with a sports team, league or property until this past weekend.
On Saturday night at UFC 202, the sports property and Tagboard — a social search and display platform — partnered to create a first-of-its-kind social experience for fighters Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz.
Prior to the main event, the two companies worked in tandem and manually curated fans’ motivational tweets and inspirational posts on Facebook/Instagram to be seen by both fighters on a rotating slideshow, with only positive and supportive messages making it to the social stream that included the hashtags #NateDiaz and #ConorMcGregor.
Re: locker room tweets. Of course we manually approve appropriate posts. Only Nate sees Nate posts & same for Conor pic.twitter.com/1JxS851Kmp
— Shanda (@UFC_Shanda) August 20, 2016
“(Social media) is a way for athletes to connect with their fans and build a true community,” said Josh Decker, Chief Executive Officer, Tagboard. “Imagine the motivation of seeing thousands of positive messages from all over the world just before the biggest fight of your career. Integrating it into the locker room tells fans that their posts can actually make a difference in the performance of their favorite athlete and possibly change the outcome of a match.”
Shanda Maloney, the UFC’s Director of Digital Marketing/Social Media, recently met with Tagboard executives at the Sports PR Summit in San Francisco last month. At the Summit, she suggested displaying social posts over the Octagon, outside T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas and directly to athletes’ locker rooms. Following the discussion, both parties confirmed they could execute the unique social initiative.
What followed was the the sports property having the highest use of its hashtag (#UFC202) during the event with 1.7 million posts, in part due to fans having the opportunity to see their social words of encouragement inside each fighter’s locker room. For a sports entity that always stretches the limits inside the Octagon, it’s now taking that similar mindset and focus to social.
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“This was the first-ever Tagboard activation that went above and beyond what professional sports teams and leagues are doing now with aggregating social content onto jumbotrons and video boards,” said Farren Benjamin, Head of Sports Partnerships, Tagboard. “…This is something we have been craving to see and we are so happy that UFC allowed our platform to deliver social posts directly to the athletes themselves.”
What a night @TMobileArena! #UFC202 is one for the history books! pic.twitter.com/VFkQ6UvaZW
— UFC (@ufc) August 21, 2016