Sports and Snapchat (KSS-782)

When discussing sports and new media, the main topics usually involve Twitter and Facebook. However, Snapchat is becoming a more popular method for sports organizations to market to their consumers. In October 2013, the New Orleans Saints were the first team to create a Snapchat account (Burns, 2014). This allowed them to send a picture message to several ‘friends’ through its ‘Story’ function, which was available to be viewed for only 24 hours.
 
Snapchat differs from the other social media platforms because it does not store past content and is only visible for a brief time period. Twitter and Facebook both utilize a news feed to display content to followers, which can all be seen on their websites. Snapchat allows its users to create messages in a unique manner and it is more personal because it involves adding friends in order to view and send content to each other.
 
Social media continues to progress into developing more personal levels of communication. This is significant to sports organizations because this leads to a closer relationship with fans. I think that this will help Snapchat become a common platform for sports organizations to market their content and reach fans, but I know that there will be another new media platform that will overtake Snapchat sooner rather than later.
 
I also think about the issues that are created by Twitter and Facebook for sports organizations because they cannot control the content being shared on these websites by athletes, fans, and personnel. Snapchat diminishes this problem because the content is only viewable for a short time period and is not stored to be viewed in the future. It also doesn’t reach worldwide to the common public so it greatly decreases the chance of someone taking the information out of context and creating more negative publicity from it.

I am a new user of Snapchat so there are still many functions I need to learn about. I’m not sure if I would really use it as a sport manager but I understand how it could be a useful and practical platform for sport marketing. I know that pictures are a popular interest that appeals to many females so Snapchat may also help recruit more women as fans of sports teams by manipulating that feature. Either way, I will be interested to see how many teams eventually follow the Saints and join the Snapchat trend.

Reference:

Burns, M. (2014, March 7). Snapchat's rise as the 'it' social media channel in sports. Retrieved from Sporting News: http://www.sportingnews.com/sport/story/2014-03-07/snapchat-sports-social-media-digital-communications-login