LA Lakers - Facebook Winners

Wow - my sixteenth blog post, it feels good to say that. Anyways, as you may or may not be able to tell by the title of my post. The Los Angeles Lakers are the first North American sports team to reach 11 million fans on Facebook.

If I would have had to guess, I would have probably not picked the Lakers to lead the category, I probably would have went with either the Dallas Cowboys or the New York Yankees. But according to this article on NBA.com, they are in fourth place worldwide, trailing only FC Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United, who are all European soccer clubs.

Apparently it has only taken the Lakers only three years to reach this status. They created both a Facebook and Twitter accounts during the 2008-2009 season. According to Tim Harris, Lakers CMO/Senior Vice President of Business Operations, “When we created our Facebook page three years ago, we did so with the intention of using the platform as a way to personally connect with our fans not only in America, but all over the world.” It has clearly been working. When I last checked the actually have 11,020,104 viewers, so the number continues to rise.

We know that they have the most, but according to this article, the Charlotte Bobcats have the fewest with only 85,000. That is a huge difference between first and last place.

I am not surprised that the Lakers are tops in the NBA, they are in a huge city and have a storied franchise. It sounds like they use Facebook the right away, by giving their fans a personal look at the team. A chance to hear from the coaches, the Laker Girls and they are even offered merchandise specials.

We have talked all semester long about how important social media is and Facebook is King (at least right now.) If you want to reach millions of people, there is no better way than adding a few pictures/videos and quick blurbs to your Facebook account.  To quote a different sport movie, “If you build it, they will come”, and that is just the case with Facebook, and well I guess the Los Angeles Lakers.

Social Media Marketing a Must!

We have talked so much about social media this semester that I feel as if I could help any business promote their product online. Whether it is a non-profit or Valley City State University, just about anyone can use social media to promote themselves or a business.

I found an article on Forbes website that goes into detail about what a Chief Marketing Officer should be doing to make sure they are using social media to its fullest.  I talked about last week how companies all over are hiring people to do just this. The article I found this week talks about what those people should be doing to make sure they stay on top of it.

One of the most interesting things the article talks about is that these officers along with their employees need to sit down and learn what each tool does. Something we have broken down a lot this semester. It even suggest that if you don’t know to ask your children. Lets face it, kids these days seem to have a knack for understanding and using all these tools.  Another suggestion that this author makes is that the CMO’s need to not only delegate what their employees do, but make sure that they are up to par with everything as well. I would imagine that most CMO’s have been doing their jobs for a very long time and never imagined that they would be using something called Twitter to promote a business.

The article also talks about some statistics about Facebook that I found extremely interesting and would like to share them. Every hour on Facebook, users share three million links, make six million new friends, share eight million photos and make 30 million comments. Those numbers are absolutely staggering and to think that this was hardly around five years ago.  One other statistic they make is that for every eight minutes someone spends on the internet, they spend one of those on Facebook. Wow!

The last paragraph talks about how its no longer an option to have a presence on social media, it’s a must! Something we have talked about all this semester and I couldn’t agree more!