Download to read offline
Uploaded byJoakim Nilsson
Social Monitor Keynote - London Affiliate Conference 2015 #LAC2015
This document discusses the social media buzz around online sportsbooks in 2014. It finds that Paddy Power was the most mentioned sportsbook, receiving over 3 million mentions. Overall, 3 million unique authors discussed sportsbooks on social media platforms like Twitter in 2014. The document breaks down the types of authors and finds that 89% of sportsbook mentions were on Twitter. It also categorizes and quantifies the most common topics of discussion, such as sports, odds, bonuses and promotions.
Social Monitor Keynote - London Affiliate Conference 2015 #LAC2015
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8. #iGamingBuzz In 2014 wecollected +10 million unique mentions across all online sources…
- 9. #iGamingBuzz 2014 Year inreview: Sportsbooks’ Social Media Buzz
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13. #iGamingBuzz With 3,7 millionmentions Paddy Power is the most talked about sportsbook in 2014
- 14. #iGamingBuzz 3 million uniqueauthors talked about sportsbooks in 2014…
- 15. #iGamingBuzz 4 categories ofauthors JOURNALISTS/ BLOGGERS SPORTSBOOKS CUSTOMERS/ PROSPECTS AFFILIATES/ PARTNERS
- 16. #iGamingBuzz Don’t ignore the16% of tweets from the female twitter audience
- 17.
- 18.
- 19. #iGamingBuzz Gender split stayedeven throughout the year
- 20. #iGamingBuzz 89% of allsportsbook mentions were tweets in 2014
- 21. #iGamingBuzz What was beingtalked about in 2014?
- 22. #iGamingBuzz Sky Bet andBetfair brands made it into the most talked about topics in 2014 – PP owned the World Cup with #BrazilNuts
- 23.
- 24. #iGamingBuzz Category 2: Bonus& Promotions
- 25.
- 26. #iGamingBuzz Category€ 4: Accounts& Payments
- 27. #iGamingBuzz Category 5: Poker,Casino & Other products
- 28. #iGamingBuzz 64% of allsportsbook Social Buzz was related to Sports, Odds, Bonus or Promotions
- 29. #iGamingBuzz 12% of SBObet’sSocial buzz is related to Accounts & Payments
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
- 33. #iGamingBuzz 888sport increased theirSocial buzz 40x from May to June 2014
- 34. #iGamingBuzz Q&A Post session chat:#IGAMINGBUZZ Follow me @JoakimNilsson Slides will be available on slideshare.com/JoakimNilsson
Editor's Notes
- #3 Good afternoon! So, this wouldn’t be a proper session about social media if we hadn’t our own hashtag! How many of you have managed to get connected on the WIFI in here? IF YOU DID… Mobiles up, get connected on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and share insights or ask me questions that I can follow up with you afterwards with using #IGAMINGBUZZ
- #4 Alright! During my almost 10 years in digital marketing SOCIAL MEDIA has as you all know completely exploded during the last couple of years… I do think that today it’s almost obsolete to talk about “social media” as pretty much every part of the web has some sort of social component to it We started of with blogging platforms, then came social networks like Facebook, twitter and video platforms such as Youtube, and today we talk about things like Instagram and Snapchat. As marketers we’ve more tools, technologies and channels available than ever before, and we’ll probably have even more tomorrow. Most of today’s igaming operators and affiliates are using one or many of these channels to communicate and engage with their audience…. But as we all now, it’s not only you as Sportsbook operators and affiliates that got new tools… more importantly so, your players, prospects any everyone else that is your audience now got a public online voice…
- #5 And this is What I’m specializing in… I’m helping brands to monitor, analyze and making sense of all that social media buzz that is relevant for them And today we’re going to look at some data from the sportsbook industry. So just to clarify, we’re not looking at which sportsbook has the most likes on facebook or who has the most twitter followers, but we’re focusing on the audience, and what we’re looking at is who’s being talked about, by who, where and what they say! Like in this mention from Petro on Google+ talking about Alonso’s interview with Bwin from March last year.
- #6 Or this Paddy Power repost on Instagram from Luke…
- #7 Or this tweet from Simon asking a couple of sportsbooks if they are taking bets on the WeberCup (sadly for him no one did) So what I would like to do today is to take you through a broad summary of how the Social media buzz for sports books looked like in 2014…
- #8 With the iGaming Business Social Monitor solution that I manage we’ve now gathered Social Media Buzz for the whole of 2014 across a bit more than 70 sports book operators in English language…
- #9 BIG DATA is a BIG buzzword these days, but here we’re really talking about a huge volume of data... During the whole year we collected over 10 million unique mentions across all online sources, not only social media sites such as Facebook and twitter, but as you saw some examples of before; all online sites weather that be news sites, affiliates sites, blogs, forums and of course all other social networks such as youtube, instagram, flickr etc…
- #10 - So here it is, the Sportsbooks’ Social media buzz – 2014 year in review!
- #11 Pause… When we understand that our customers, prospects and partners all have their own online voices that we can infiltrate and use… …we as sports book brands need to understand what we can do to get them talking about us. There’s one brand that stands out from the rest and have story telling in their DNA. …Placing a replica of Sir Alex Ferguson inside an emergence box outside the Old Trafford clearly sparked a some online Social Media Buzz…
- #12 - … it’s the same brand that paid tribute to David Moyes’s services to Liverpool by placing a replica outside the Anfield.
- #13 - …that offered 100% clean urine samples to riders during the Giro d’Italia (Even though I think this is photoshopped)
- #14 If you’ve been to any of my previous keynotes or follow what we publish on Social media, it’s no surprise to anyone in this audience that Paddy Power is the most talked about sports book brand in 2014. What you are looking at here are the top-10 sportsbook brands in terms of volume of social media buzz i.e. unique mentions across all channels for the whole of 2014. Given that Paddy are the masters of communication and that creativity seems to be in their organizational DNA, It doesn’t strike me that they are the most talked about sportsbook, but WHAT strikes me is HOW MUCH LARGER they are than everyone else. Paddy had 3,7 million unique mentions alone in 2014, which is almost the total sum of Bet365, Betfair, Skybet, William Hill, Ladbrokes, Betvictor, Betfred, Coral and 888sport together. The difference between Paddy and everyone else can pretty much be summed up saying that Paddy will jump on anything that can create a story, there’s resources behind it and they make it a priority. Whilst other brands are thinking about what Social media guru to hire to grow their fan pages, Paddy thinks about what guru to hire that can create stories, content and literally connect with the audience. That’s seriously being an industry leader with margin!
- #15 If we then look at who authored these 10 million mentions in we found that they all come from around 3 million different authors… meaning that on average each author would talk about or mention a sportsbook brand a bit more than 3x each.
- #16 So who are these 3 million authors? Sifting through all the data and looking at who wrote these mentions I’ve found out that there are 4 distinct categories of personas in the iGaming industry talking about sports books. The first group is the sports book brands talking about themselves (or in rare occasions mentioning a competitor). This group is fairly small, typically less than 1% of all brand mentions per brand and would typically be mentions such as sports book tweeting a link to their own domain, or putting a branded hashtag on their tweets etc. Secondly we have one of the largest groups which is Customer and Prospects, we’ll look closer at the topics later but this group makes up for around 30-70% of all mentions depending on brand. The largest group seen to volume of mentions are AFFILIATES… by far. For some brands more than 90% of the mentions are from affiliates. But unfortunately these mentions are often not the most interesting ones as they commonly sounds like CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR BONUS NOW and are posted 200 times per day… often resulting in a closure of your social media account. The last groups is what we’d call Blogger and Journalists. This would typically be smaller or niche affiliate sites with sports passionate owners OR journalists reporting on news from publically listed companies.
- #17 We then looked at the demographical data across all the authors on Twitter for the whole year. Since we can get fairly accurate meta data from Twitter, we looked at all tweets and ran them through our demographics query. You can either read this as 84% of the Social buzz are coming from a male audience, hence the 16% doesn't’t matter. Or you can view the 16% of social buzz from the female audience as an opportunity – We’ve estimated that the mention volume from the female audience is around 900,000 to 1,2 million mentions. The real driver behind getting female punters seems to be other products such as Casino and Bingo.. Naturally we see that brands such as 888 and Unibet are getting a higher percentage of mentions from the female audience than the pure players i.e those only offering a Sportsbook.
- #18 But women are also interested in sports betting… Sharon is tweeting: “Watching the football final, finally got my TV back and after today I will be richer as I won’t be betting anymore”
- #19 - And there’s Charlotte who’s clearly discontent with Betfred…
- #20 Here we have taken all the tweets for the male and female audience and plotted them on a time line… Red are tweets from the female audience and yellow tweets from the male audience. When I ran this query in the system I was convinced that I would see a decrease in tweets from females during the period of the World Cup, but I was wrong… The gender demographics actually seems to stay unchanged throughout the year… a surprise to me! Apart from the gender split, what is interesting here is the volume of tweets per month… normally the summer months are very quite but here we really see the enormous impact that the World Cup in Brazil had on Social media buzz…
- #21 Speaking about Twitter… Twitter was by far the largest channel in terms of mention volume during 2014… and continues to be in 2015. With 89% share-of-voice Twitter is of course a very important channel for sportsbooks and affiliates, but… mention volume isn’t everything So we did a qualitative analysis of what is actually being talked about…
- #22 So now we understand a bit more about the audience and their reach. Now let’s look at bit on what people talked about during 2014.
- #23 This is a world cloud looking for the most frequently talked about topics across all sportsbook brands and channels. All of these topics you see here have been mentioned at least 10,000 times over the year. When it comes to acquisition campaigns we see that “Deposit bonus”, “New customers” and “Free bets” are the most common topics… many of them probably within the same sentence. Football clubs such as Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Real Madrid were the ones making it into the most talked about topics Is it worth sponsoring a team, league or an event? If you’re Sky Bet or Betfair you would probably say YES – As both Sky Bet Championship and Betfair Hurdle made it into the list The biggest topic of them all was of course the World Cup which Paddy Power dominated with their #BrazilNuts theme and campaigns
- #24 Most of the topics you saw on the previous slide were related to Sports & Odds (of course you’re thinking…) When we did a qualitative analysis of the +10 million mentions we quickly saw that almost 90% of the Social Buzz (or mentions as we call them) could be categorised into 5 different categories. The first one is the most obvious one is of course Sports & Odds… Here’s an actual print screen of mention – Mr Duggan tweeting about Arsenal’s new manager. Anything that mentions something sports or betting related would fall into this category… a youtube video talking about Paddy Power and Rugby or an Instagram photo with Zlatan hashtagged #888
- #25 The second Category is “Bonus & Promotions”… Here Jake is asking Boylesports about a free bet, who quickly replies and forwards the tweet to their Customer Service twitter account. Well done Boyle!
- #26 Third up is the “Affiliates & Partners” category which can vary from affiliate programs chasing affiliates… to affiliates chasing operators
- #27 The fourth group is about “Account & Payments”, meaning everything that concerns a players account such as login, registration, withdrawals and deposits. Typical such examples are players such in this forum post from tonyinessex about withdrawals on WillHill
- #28 The fifth and last group is about “Poker, Casino & other products” not related to sports betting such as this one from wscalley
- #29 Which types of mentions did they talk mostly about? The data confirms that we very well are in the sports book industry Although a mention can fall into multiple categories, 64% of the mentions collected & analyzed fell into the Sports & Odds category. 6% of them mentions are talking about Bonuses & Promotions, 3% talks about other products that sports betting, and Affiliates & Partners makes up for 0,5% of all mentions. The remaining 0,5% of mentions related to Account & Payments may look irrelevant, but in fact that is 50,000 unique mentions split across the brands we monitor that where talking about making a deposit, withdrawal or anything else account related that often requires the attention of customer service.
- #30 But of course that varies a lot from brand to brand… 12% of SBObet’s Social Buzz is around Accounts & Payments… 11,5% more than the industry average. Paddy Power is topping the Sports & Odds category with 94% and 188bet is leading the Bonus talk! Tonybet are being promoted by affiliates and Bodog is going strong with other products!
- #31 Then we had the World Cup in Brazil this year… Don Mooney is talking about the World Cup’s most unusual bet… Paddy Power giving 200/1 for England to win
- #32 - And here’s another Paddy Power mention during the World Cup… James sharing his experience betting on the Paddy app…
- #33 Well you guessed it… It’s Paddy Power again… During the World Cup in Brazil Paddy power stood for 50% of of all the sportsbook mentions. Alone they had half a million mentions, exactly the same amount as all other sportsbooks together. Hats off.
- #34 To round this session up I had to find some type of data that didn’t involve Paddy Power, or else you would think that they’d paid me to stand here. However, another brand did actually pay me to stand here (well sort of )… Most sportsbooks had a pretty even share of mention volume month over month although it increased significantly for most brands during the World Cup… But one brand broke all the records and made a mess of my beautiful chart… and that was 888sport Lingering around 1,000 mentions per month up until May 888sport went crazy on Twitter just before and during the World Cup and managed to really engage with their audience. In June they had generated little more than 41,000 mentions…. That’s an increase with 40x times month-over-month. Well done 888! With that said, I’d like to say thank you and hand over to the moderator to see if we have any questions!
- #35 London Q&A Q: Can you monitor anything that is published on social media? A: The short answer is: ALMOST. The long answer is that the technology we use monitors over 500M sources such as blogs, forums and just about any news site. Its also directly plugged into Twitter’s firehose meaning that unlike cheaper technologies we can see exactly EVERYTHING that has been publicly tweeted. Another frequent question is on Facebook; can everything be monitored? The reality is that many people share their updates with their friends only i.e. it’s sent within a closed group just like send a group email or text message. These updates are not available on our data. That’s both unethical and illegal… we leave that to the guys at the NSA. Q: We’ve seen in your pres that Paddy Power is huge in terms of social media buzz, why do you think they get so much more buzz than any other brand? A: To be talked about on social media your brand needs to create stories. Your latest Welcome Bonus isn’t a story people will talk about, maybe your affiliates will tweet about it but that’s about it. However pretending that you gave the Amazon forrest a “Brazilian wax”, that’s a story to talk about. Story telling is in the DNA of Paddy Power, and without knowing much about how they are organised internally I dare to be bold and say that it’s a culture within the organisation. It’s a team play and definitely not something a social media guy in the corner of the office put together. Q: What’s the one thing that sports books should to to increase their social buzz? A: You need to start with identifying existing behaviors. What do people say about you today, are they sharing bets or winnings? When you’ve identified such behavior, let’s say sharing winnings, then incentivize your existing customers to share these stories online. Either but facilitating it with technology, or by financial incentives or a combination.