The RFU: Implementing A Data Driven Social Media Strategy

This week we’ve been lucky enough to catch up with The RFU’s Social Media Manager, Josh Ayto. He came into the Twickenham based governing body for rugby in the summer of last year. Since then he’s overseen a period of growth across all their channels and a change of strategy along the way.

Hi Josh, thanks for taking time out to chat to Digital Sport today. To start off can you give us an idea of what were the social media platform stats when you arrived.

When I joined here we had a total social reach of 708,784 in July 2013 (over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). As of the end of the 6 Nations we have 1,205,413 fans following us with new channels like Google+ contributing over 70k.

What freedom were you given to develop the social media strategy and what were your objectives? 

What’s been great is having the ability to set my own strategy and goals for social here, since there wasn’t really much before. Two of the RFU’s key objectives are to grow the game and broaden the reach of rugby, I took that literally to grow our social reach and grow it a lot, so when the Rugby World Cup comes round we’re already a social power house and can take advantage of the huge mass media event it will be here. While growth was important, we then wanted to grow in the right way, through engagement, through being more interactive, more connected and adding more value to our fans. In sport we’re lucky that, for the most part, we have great stories to tell and the potential to capture amazing content that people deeply care about so my focus was more towards optimising the delivery of that content, via social, to suit our fans.

So how did this fit in with your idea of being more data driven?

The idea of taking a rigorous data-driven approach was born from the fact, like many companies, we didn’t have the resource to waste – everything we do we have to learn from and keep iterating to make it the best we can and if something wasn’t working, we’d kill it and move on. So now everything we put on social is tracked and benchmarked, we’ve built up rich insights into our fans and what works/when but also it allows us to very quickly see if new ideas are working, based on real fan feedback. We track multiple social and digital metrics, RTs, Likes, +1 and clicks, Website UVs and more. What this means is we can work harder for our fans and offer them the best content we can at the right time for them, while not overloading their social feeds when we’re not that relevant to them.

We’ve been through two big England tournaments now using this strategy and the continued increase in performance has been great – 2.25x and 2.9x increase in growth on Twitter and Facebook respectively during the 6 Nations vs QBE Internationals 2013, an 11% increase in clicks to the website from Twitter per Test week.

And what does the future hold for the RFU and your work across social?

Continuing to build and learn on what we have, trying new channels and continuing to trial new ideas. A lot of our focus is on the World Cup next year and also what then happens after that where, hopefully, we’ll be talking a massive influx of new fans into the game.

 

Thanks Josh for your time and we look forward to the Summer Tour and the World Cup next year!

 

 

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Daniel McLaren
Daniel McLaren 820 posts

Dan is the Founder & CEO of Digital Sport. Can be found at sports industry events and heard every week on the Digital Sport Insider podcast. @DanielMcLaren

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