FanSection Blog

We just ran a fan photo contest for Ohio State and Michigan football fans in anticipation of “The Game” this weekend. Everyone who follows sports knows that this rivalry is huge, and our numbers here at FanSection confirm this. When we started the contest 11 days ago there were 323,000 fans between our OSU and Michigan applications. This large number of fans is one of the reasons we chose to hold a contest for this rivalry. During the contest we have seen the numbers shoot up between the apps by over 15,000. We also saw the number of daily users of the Michigan application increase by 10% and the OSU application double its daily users! If you had any doubts about fans bringing their excitement to online social media its time to throw them out the window. I picked out three things to take away from this contest.

1) Marketers who are looking to promote their products around big sporting events should be aware that fans are highly engaged in social media. Social networks are a great place to extend your marketing campaigns. For example why not tie a TV spot you plan to run during the big event to a social media campaign that engages fans leading up to it.

2) Social media continues to gain momentum even in the worst times. I’m not talking about the economy, I’m talking about the Wolverines. We can all agree that this season has been tough one for Michigan fans, but our numbers show that they never give up. While a large number of the 15,000 new fans came from the OSU app, we still saw Michigan’s app increase in numbers even after the loss to Northwestern last weekend. This demonstrates that fans continue to embrace social media even when their teams are down…and that Michigan has some diehard fans.

3) In the few contests we’ve had at FanSection, babies always seem to be a fan favorite. Apparently there’s something about babies that makes even the most hardcore sports fans soften up. Both OSU and Michigan voted for babies as their “Biggest Fan.” This leads me to believe that babies make the biggest fans across college football. I think for our next contest we need to ban baby photos, or possibly get it sponsored by Huggies.