Earlier this week I had the honour of speaking at the World Yacht Racing Forum in Gothenburg, Sweden.  It is a sport that, outside of the Olympics, I am quite unfamiliar with.  It was a really interesting couple of days hearing about marketing, events and sponsorship before delivering my short piece about social media.  The moderator for the event was my friend David Fuller.  David is Founder and CEO of Pilote Media and runs the successful blog YachtRacing.biz.  Here is a look at the world of sailing and social media by David… 

The other week, I attended a couple of events that looked into the importance of content as part of a marketing strategy. Sports brands have it comparatively easy when it comes to creating compelling stories, at least they have more raw content to weave stories out of, even if they struggle with narrative sometimes.

Content is about more than social media. In fact, it could be argued that social media has made some companies lazy by building a myth around casual interactivity being a proxy for engagement.

One thing is becoming more established. “Vanity metrics”, which include ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ are not as important as measures which take into account quality rather than quantity.

So in this month’s look at the world of Sailsport on Facebook, we are going to start off with a measure of interactivity – the number of people that Facebook say are ‘Talking About’ a certain page.

Top 10 – Talked About SailSport Facebook Pages.

No surprises for guessing that the Vendee Globe and associated pages are at the top of the list this month. The round-the-world race has found 43,815 new likes in the last month, but more importantly 21,268 people are interacting with the facebook page – double the 2nd place  and 10 times more than 10th place. Virtual Regatta is the official online game for the Vendee Globe, so it makes sense that there would be an increase in the number of people talking about this page. Alex Thomson Racing are also in the Top 10, but in the UK at least the team is using paid advertising on Facebook to attract visitors and increase social metrics.

Special mention goes to Luna Rossa, who presumably by leveraging Prada’s 2 million or so ‘likes’ managed to get more people talking about the page than like it.

Top 10 Sailsport pages – Actual Growth.

Having said that ‘likes’ was not the favourite measure of people who are looking to engage on social media, the sport of sailing is still trying to get an audience, let alone interact with them. Growth in the number of people who sign up to receive updates from sailing brands in their feeds is important to the health of the marketing of the sport.

North Sails have recently released a film about the history of the company. It’s a great example of content marketing – telling relevant stories to people and changing their attitudes and behavior as a result. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that North Sails’ content on Facebook is predominantly written in Italian, which might explain why it is most popular in Rome and could explain why 11,650 more people decided to invite the brand into their social feed this month.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Clq_MuSm28&list=UUw_RFuDZeyhNsmNMNlIn_uw&index=3[/youtube]