If any sports league is doing Pinterest right, it’s Major League Baseball. Go ahead, search your favorite team, they’re on Pinterest. Major League Baseball has complete commitment to Pinterest across all 30 teams.
Since we’re based out of Wisconsin, it was a natural fit for us to speak with the Milwaukee Brewers on their Pinterest strategy. And if you’re interested in more on sports teams and Pinterest, give a look back to our previous interview with the Milwaukee Bucks.
Caitlin Moyer, the Senior Manager of Advertising and Marketing with the Brewers took some time to talk with us recently.
Get Pinterested: Thanks for speaking with us. We are very impressed with Brewers participation on Pinterest! Can you share with us what attracted the Brewers to use Pinterest?
Caitlin: Here at the Brewers, as throughout Major League Baseball, we like to keep our fingers on the pulse of the ever-changing social media landscape. Obviously, Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social sites right now—fastest ever, actually— and we, like everyone else, were attracted to the highly visual nature of the medium, as well the site’s rapid sharing power.
Baseball—and sports in general—produces lots of compelling visuals such as amazing plays, athletes and mascots in action, historical moments, etc., along with interesting content such as new merchandise, upcoming promotions, photographs submitted by fans and more. Thus, the nature of Pinterest coincided very well with the content we already have available to us—it is simply another way of sharing that content, of engaging with our fans in a space where they are already spending a lot of their time.
How has using social media like Pinterest been effective for the Brewers? Are you measuring any specific metrics? What would you consider to be a grand slam? (sorry, I can’t resist a baseball analogy!)
There is always a lot of discussion about ROI when it comes to social media, but for us, our primary goal is to provide interesting content for our fans and engage with them in this space. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are so different from our traditional advertising mediums, such as print, radio, billboard, TV, etc., where we’re simply implementing a push strategy with our messaging.
Social media provides the opportunity to obtain feedback and engage in a dialogue with our fans, in addition to keeping them informed, particularly leveraging the chance to drive fans to brewers.com, where they can activate with our brand in other ways.
We judge success on interactions with our brand in the space, whether it’s comments, likes, retweets, or repins, etc. If people are engaging with our brand, we’ve done our job correctly.
Of course, we have also experimented with some special ticket promotions via Facebook and Twitter and we’ve been able to associate a specific amount of sales and revenue from the various sources. To date, we would consider most of those efforts a success, but we’re always learning as we go as well.
One of our most successful such promotions was a promotion that took place on Twitter last year. We worked with one of our players, pitcher John Axford, to offer a package that included a ticket, food and beverage and a signed bobblehead of Axford for just $59 (Axford’s jersey number). The tickets allotted for this promotion sold out in minutes after just one tweet from Axford, so we opened up some additional inventory, which promptly sold out as well.
The great thing about social media is that there is very little—and, in this case, no—cost involved in the promotion and your brand has everything to gain.
What’s different about using Pinterest for a sports organization (say, from using Pinterest for a retail or DIY purpose)?
Using Pinterest for a sports organization is more about appealing to the emotion of being a fan, rather than necessarily pitching a home improvement project, decorating idea or recipe. The images we’re pinning are related to moments in history, great plays, our players and mascots and the fun of being a Brewers fan. These images are shared more for people to display their Brewers pride rather than a reminder of something they would like to get to in the future.
Like retail, however, we are using the space to showcase some of our newest merchandise since we know that Pinterest is a popular place for people to pin items they want to purchase, gift ideas, or the latest fashions; however, with that, our goal here isn’t necessarily sales (that’s a great byproduct!), but more to spread the brand in this space and get third-party endorsement from other fans who like the items and repin them.
We love Ryan Braun. He is a ‘pin-up’ – but does he pin?
Currently, none of our players are personally involved in Pinterest, but of course, we have pins of most of our players and we’ll continue to keep up with the demand throughout the season.
We only see one pin of the beloved Klement’s Sausages! Will you be pinning more Sausage Race images throughout the season?
Absolutely! We just officially launched our Pinterest presence this month, so look for much, much more to come in the future!
Big thanks to Caitlin Moyer for taking the time to talk with us.
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