Sportskeeda is India’s hottest sports blog at the moment and there’s nothing that you can take away from them. Their platform has enabled many wannabe sports writers to exhibit their talent, thus ensuring a constant supply of creative work from any part of India with an access to the Internet.
With a thriving blog space at hand, a social media presence would seem next on the line. Sportskeeda hammered that nail right where it should be and how!
Their diligence and dedication to produce quality work over the last few years has eventually translated to a thriving social media response to their posts and exponentially increased traction.
Is there a strategic method key to their success?
Of course.
Sportskeeda‘s Facebook posts can broadly be divided into two categories :
1) Blog related posts- Fulcrum to the content plan
2) Like Generation posts- Purely for increased traction
Starting Up
The Blog posts roughly revolve around content shared directly off their blog so as to direct traffic to it. This may include articles by the editorial team, freelance writers, columnists, polls, contests, video clips and vines.
These articles can be divided on the lines of a :
- Match Review/Preview
- Satirical piece
- Tribute to a player
- Open letter from a fan
- Tactical Analysis
- Infographic based piece
- Hard/Soft News item
- Top 5/Top 10 countdowns
Sportskeeda have employed this method of social media marketing as an obvious tactic to impress viewers and potential ad men with the content on their blog space and the consistency in material and rate of publishing as any other blog would do. At least that’s how they began their Facebook image building.
These posts relied more on the quality of the articles received by amateur writers on the blog and the editorial team’s ability to present them as readable material.
Gaining a foot hold
Sportskeeda’s amateur contributors soon began to find an audience through Facebook posts that shared their work. A re-branding of the Sportskeeda logo and a few changes on the blog interface saw the renewed interface easier to the eye.
Their facebook posts saw an increase in relevance too. News items were instantly updated by the editorial team and a Sportskeeda writer’s group created separately to impart work on a weekly basis in an orderly fashion.
Sportskeeda weren’t just a sports blog with random sports content anymore; there were a reliable sports news online hub.
Capitalizing on goodwill
Sportskeeda’s continued success required a new branding approach. The reliance on just content wouldn’t deliver the mandatory likes and comments. The new strategy?
Blog posts in combination with posts produced purely for Facebook traction were introduced.
Like Generation Posts
These posts involve images edited with the sole intention of gaining traction to the Facebook page as opposed to the previous posts concerned with directing traffic to the blog.
They include:
- Quotes
- StatisticS
- Factoids – Interesting facts
- Birthday related posts
- Vines – Popular short video clips
- Memes or Vines
- Nostalgic images – “On this day……”
These posts are extensively used by Sportskeeda on a regular basis to continuously feed their audience with information and continue building a relationship with them on a consumer level.
Like Generation posts are constantly shuffled up according to the scheduling of matches, player/manager birthdays etc to a point where at least 4-5 of these images are released daily, edited particularly catering to the average Facebook user who would not want to spend more than 10 seconds on a post.
Sportskeeda currently have 2,113,312 likes on their facebook page and this number seems to be growing by the minute. With a fool proof strategy and an avalanche of writers at their disposal, there’s no stopping for them for a while.
