How to engage sports fans through voice

Sports fans in numbers

This year has been a huge year for sports with the Rio Olympics, the FA Cup Final, Wimbledon and so much more. One thing is clear; sports fans are a passionate and engaged group of people. In terms of popularity, soccer (aka football if you are from across the pond) remains the number one most popular sport of all with over 4 billion followers across the world. It’s no coincidence that soccer is also the highest paid sport of all with billions of dollars going into salaries and bonuses. Basketball comes in second with a smaller but still pretty impressive total of 1 billion followers.

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Best_Player_in_Europe

Sports online

There are a ton of sports fans out there who want their voices heard and one of the great ways they are able to follow their favorite competition, team or player is online through blogs or through social media. Barcelona and Real Madrid are two of the largest and most valuable sports teams in the world. They are also the two teams that had the best overall social media in sports last year (according to Forbes). Of course, social media is not just about the team, its also very much about “the stars of the show” like Messi or Ronaldo. And best of all, social media gives fans the opportunity to react to and interact with the teams they love and with each other.

Sports fans are evangelists

Sports content online is a huge arena, both in terms of the actual sports events themselves and in terms of the online content generated about these events like blogs, reports, reviews, and website content. Something else to keep in mind is that sports are a very unique arena in terms of its audience. Sports fans aren’t just customers, they are, as Stanford Business points out much more passionate than that; fans will paint their face, fans will evangelize. Fans are already bought-in and extremely fervent about the sports they follow.

Standing out from the crowd

There is tons of content out there, and as more bloggers, sports organizations and even the teams themselves look to expand, increase revenue and drive more traffic to their sites, everyone faces an increasing level of competition. Even more than with other content, sports content is all about interaction. People don’t want objective reporting on their favorite event; they want exciting coverage and great conversation. The online world can facilitate this type of interaction, and the main way it does this is through comments and social media. Having a comments section transforms a static blog or web page into an active and dynamic conversation.

Go one step further with voice

While text-based sports interactions allow for a conversation, using a wider variety of media helps to improve the overall quality of content. One great modality to explore here is a voice. Using voice comments instead of text comments allows sports fans to communicate in a more personal way, and in a way that is almost as if they were face-to-face with each other. Voice comments can also facilitate conversations with sports fans and the teams they love. Another great feature is the option to leave a high-quality voice snippet on a website so fans can directly listen to what their favorite sports commentators and players have to say.

Heyoya is a game-changing comments and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

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