Front Office Sports - NFL Squads Use Slate To Upgrade Real-Time Social Media Presence
As football fans descend on Miami for Super Bowl LIV this week, so do many of the brightest minds of the digital-media side of the sports industry. All of these professionals know that three things are important to a successful digital campaign: standing out aesthetically, consistency and efficiency. Throughout the National Football League, digital marketers and content creators are finding that partnering with Slate has helped all three.Slate is a real-time social-content tool that allows teams to create image and video templates for Instagram, Twitter, and other social platforms. This creates the opportunity to create consistent, on-brand content using pre-approved assets. Creators can then resize, adjust, trim, crop and watermark content in Slate to share to at the proper dimensions.
This past season, over half of the teams in the NFL worked with Slate to elevate their vertical content as well as take pressure off of their in-house design team.
“Design is very important to us on social,” Scott Kegley, Executive Director of Digital Media and Innovation with the Minnesota Vikings, said. “We want to create a consistent look across all of our accounts that is consistent with our brand. Slate allows us to create enough options so we are able to adjust to various types of content while still keeping things on-brand.”
Images via the Minnesota Vikings
In the past, teams would have to use several different applications to make sure that content lived up to brand standards with the correct dimensions, fonts, and watermarks.
“When Slate was introduced to our team, I was bummed I hadn’t thought of the idea myself,” Amie Kiehn, Social Media Manager for the Carolina Panthers, said. “There was such a hole in the market for branded and customize-able layouts that looked sharp and could be adaptive right away.”
In addition to increasing the quality of content, teams are also drastically increasing their content output with the use of Slate. Teams like the Panthers have noticed an uptick in the efficiency of their social media team on game days.
“When I recently brought on our newest team member, I could not wait to show her Slate,” Kiehn said. “I believe my opening line was, “This app is amazing and you’re gonna want to know where it has been all your #smsports life.”
Images via the Carolina Panthers
Teams like the NFC Champion San Francisco 49ers are also seeing the utility of Slate when it comes to sponsored campaigns. Sponsored graphics or overlays can be added to content with the click of a button.
“We had a huge send-off event for the Super Bowl and with United Airlines being a longtime partner of ours, we were able to build both custom static and motion frames to give them the best exposure possible on one of our biggest days in the Instagram era,” Johnny Volk, social media manager for the San Francisco 49ers, said.
Image via the San Francisco 49ers
Ultimately, thanks in part to the assistance that Slate has provided in improving their aesthetics, consistency, and efficiency, many NFL social teams are seeing dramatic increases in their metrics across applicable platforms.
“We’ve seen a huge increase in attention to our accounts this season and obviously a lot of that has to do with the team’s on field performance but Slate allows us to have a better approach to our Story content so fans stay engaged,” Volk states.
