Behind the Scenes: UFC’s Social Media Stunts – #Hunt4UFC

Social media has been a great tool for the UFC in the past few years, effectively using Facebook and Twitter to promote their brand, grow their fanbase, and create a communication bridge between the promotion and millions of its fans world wide.

In fact, the UFC is so adamant about the importance of social media to promote their brand, that they hired PR firm Digital Royalty to teach their fighters how to properly use social media tools. Mashable.com recently interviewed UFC CEO Dana White and asked him about importance of social media:

In order to bring his organization up to speed, White hired PR firm Digital Royalty to teach the fighters how to properly use social media. He gave the fighters a simple instruction: “I want you to Twitter your asses off,” recalled Amy Martin, Digital Royalty’s founder and CEO. Digital Royalty ran a one-on-one boot camp with the fighters, churning out 200 new media mavens over the course of three days. After the boot camp, fighter education is still an ongoing effort. “We’re constantly doing one-on-ones with them,” Martin said. “They also have my personal email address and mobile phone number.”

Amy Martin credits most of the UFC’s success to their willingness to experiment with social media, in a time when larger sport franchises are still just dipping their toes in the new technology.

Here are a couple of behind the scenes videos for one of UFC’s most popular social media stunt, #Hunt4UFC, where event tickets and UFC gear is typically given out to hundreds of fans willing to participate.

Payout Perspective:

As an example of the UFC brand strength in social media, the most Tweeted brands for the week following the UFC 121: Lesnar vs Velasquez where the following: 1) NBA 2) UFC 3) Taylor Swift 4) NFL 5) European Soccer/Football; according to Advertising Age.  The top trends within that week for the UFC were Brock Lesnar, Cain Velasquez, UFC121, McGee, Hamill, Tito Ortiz, and Brown Pride to just name a few.

Along with the twitter and facebook social media stunts,  Digital Royalty also orchestrates “behind the scenes” coverage of fighters preparing for a fight, video blogging, and guest fighter live-tweets from the official UFC account during events.  As a result, the UFC gives their fanbase enough interaction and exclusive coverage to not only build hype for their upcoming events, but also to keep their fans coming back for more as the brand continues to expand its reach and increase the fanbase through social media.