Social Media Following: UFC and Other Pro Sports

Sergio Non and Haley Blum of USA Today take a quick look at how the UFC stacks up to other professional sports leagues based on Facebook and Twitter.

Fighting Stances took a look at the number of fans for the official Facebook pages of several sports entities:

Sports entity	Facebook followers
NBA	3,180,826
UFC	2,269,450
Vancouver 2010 Olympics	1,209,379
WWE	757,845
NASCAR	702,701
NHL	574,112
NFL	508,906

Payout Perspective:

We’ve talked at length about the UFC’s willingness to experiment with social media as one of its keys to success over the last few years. Nobody really could have predicted that Facebook or Twitter would have taken off, but the UFC was smart enough to approach each with an open mind and has walked right into two very effective promotional mechanisms.

I’m not as sold on Facebook as I am on Twitter. The fact that the NBA or UFC have 2 million+ followers means little when you consider that few of those fans actually check those pages on a daily basis. It’s useful, no doubt, but the level of interaction it requires to be effective means that a company has to devote more effort/resources to creating something truly worthwhile for the consumer. Twitter, on the other hand, is potentially a very simple and effective tool if a company or celebrity can craft messages that are relevant/interesting to a fan base, because those messages are received and viewed multiple times per day.

There are also some really interesting on-site promotions that a company can run with Twitter that really help to boost the fan experience and push avidity forward. It will be interesting to see if the UFC begins to push its use of the medium even further; it’s mastered the information releases and off-site contests, but I think there’s still a host of things the promotion can do.