#weRtogether: QPR and Award-Winning Social Media

This week we’ve been lucky enough to catch up with social media award-winning football club QPR and the man who has driven them forward in the space. Adam Hulme is the Multi-Media Officer and this is the second time we’ve interviewed him. The last time being when Emma Veitriano spoke with Adam to find out some background to their great work.

This time last week the club were celebrating a big win off the pitch at the BT Sport Industry Awards in London. They then had two massive games which saw them sneak past Wigan Athletic and now face Derby County in the Championship Play-Off Final at Wembley on Bank Holiday Monday.

Between all this, Adam managed to find time to answer a few questions for us…

 

Congratulations firstly to you and the team on last night’s BTSIA award. A great achievement for the club, and especially one not in the top division this year (but hopefully will be next). What do you put your success down to?

Thanks! It was a nice surprise to be shortlisted and when we first saw who we were up against, we definitely didn’t expect to be leaving the evening with the award. It was a great achievement for the club and one I’ll personally treasure.

I suppose our success comes down to our bold and brave approach to social media and how we’re willing to try new and innovative ideas. A number of our initiatives have occurred over the past two years and have set industry-wide trends.

To have our work compared with the likes of Bayern Munich and Manchester City in this industry is something we are extremely proud of, especially considering the size or our team and budget.

 

The awards are piling up, when we last spoke in December last year, you had picked up the Football Business award for ‘Best Digital Content & Audience Growth”.   What do you think other teams can learn from your approach?

Be brave and be willing to listen and react to what fans want. We think like football fans and constantly ask ourselves ‘How would I like to digest social media?’. Pride yourselves on breaking news first and have an innovative way of doing so as these type of stories are the big hitters across social channels.

Everyone looks at how many followers they have but for us, engagement is the key and having a two-way communication channel is vital for what we are trying to achieve as a club.

 

It’s been non-stop at the club with last weekend’s successful play-offs semi-final against Wigan and now an appearance at Wembley for the Final. How did you use your digital channels to galvanise the fans for the games and what can you reveal about your Wembley plans?

Our two play-off games against Wigan Athletic went really well both on and off the pitch. We based a social media campaign around our play-off games called #weRtogether. Our aim was to galvanise our fan base and help lift the roof for our second leg at Loftus Road as we knew this would be the key to reaching the final. We did a soft launch before our final league game with a promo YouTube video  which started the ball rolling.

It wasn’t until the week before that we started picking up the pace with fans tweets and posts and more motivational stories. It was great because we even had fans designing their own#weRtogether banners for our trip to the DW Stadium.

We had a lot of plans for the Loftus Road clash so it was great to head into the game with everything to play for. We built up to the match with former players interviews, promo artwork and vines.

We allowed fans the rare opportunity of having their ‘good luck’ tweets inside the tunnel on the wall – the first time we’ve ever done this. With one lucky fan having his under the ‘THIS IS LOFTUS ROAD’ sign, which is the last thing the players saw before leaving the tunnel for the match.

We also had live tweets and Instagram pictures play on our pitch-side LED boards with fans’ tweets/pics sent in using #weRtogether. This was the first time we have used live social messages on the LEDs this season. We’ve used pre-created content but never live.

We had a media meeting this week to discuss a few Wembley ideas but it will be a case of more of the same with a few special surprises mixed in. Our live London Call-In show will be streamed live from Wembley a few days before. It will be more behind-the-scenes visual content (photos and videos).

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During the second leg the #weRtogether hashtag was a success, being used over 9,500 times during the week leading up to and including the 2nd leg. The full-time tweet celebrating heading to Wembley was retweeted over 1,000 times and the pitch invasion photo over 600 times.

The campaign wasn’t just restricted to Twitter, there was plenty of activity across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Google+. All meaning that fans were kept engaged and Adam didn’t get much sleep!

Thanks to Adam for taking the time out from his really packed schedule and good luck to QPR.  This weekend will see award winning QPR take on, well, award winning Derby County (they won ‘Best Digital Content’ at the Football League Awards in March).

QPR tweet dreams

QPR Social

About author

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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