Welcome to the first edition of Social Studies, a nine part series talking with some of the brightest minds in sports social media. My first feature is on Matthew Kline of The Volume. Matthew has been with Colin Cowherd’s company since 2022, choosing to leave ESPN to become a part of it. His team has grown to 10-15 strong , and the network now boasts 17 podcasts including shows hosted by Draymond Green, Shannon Sharpe, Colin Cowherd and others.
To set the table for today’s conversation, I reached out to Matthew to discuss the relationship with his social team and the talent at The Volume. I wanted to learn how the brand measures social success, and get his advice for how to build a social media strategy for brands that can’t afford a large staff. There are a lot of great tips in here for sports media folks of all shapes and sizes. Be advised that the 30+ minute conversation we had has been edited for brevity and clarity. For the full, unedited interview visit Barrett Media’s YouTube channel.
Alex Reynolds: Let’s start by talking about your career. Tell me how you wound up at The Volume.
Matthew Kline: I started right out of college at ESPN as a production assistant doing all the normal stuff. Show logging, prompting, highlight cutting, all of that. I did it for a few years, and really honed my video editing skills. Then I got switched over to the social team. I was the kid at 23 whose friends forced him to have a Facebook account. In college, I created a Twitter profile to track trades in sports, but I never actually tweeted, which is still kind of true. I keep a low profile on the socials since I do it every day for my job.
I got really lucky. I had some tremendous bosses who I’m still very close with to this day. They served as my mentors and taught me. Steve Braband was my first boss. He’s now an executive of digital at WWE. Ashley Braband is an executive at Omaha. I worked for her too. And Michael Buckland is now a SVP for Fox Sports plus I worked with Katie Daly and Mike Foss as well. I soaked up knowledge from all of them and learned about social media’s best practices.
About a little more than two years ago, my former boss Steve Braband called me and said, “These guys at The Volume are doing some cool stuff. They’re looking for someone to come in and create and set up their social and YouTube.” At the time I was really happy with ESPN and I didn’t necessarily see myself leaving, but I trust Steve. I started having conversations, and Steve introduced me to Logan Swaim and we hit it off immediately.
The first conversation I went from being very skeptical to considering it being a real thing. I went through a couple more rounds of interviews, spent a month or two talking to them and ultimately made the decision to leave ESPN and join The Volume. It’s been an incredible ride for the first two years.
AR: When Logan [Swaim] brings you in, he says you’re starting from scratch. Based on what you had learned, your first thought was what? What did that introductory strategy look like?
MK: The first thing that immediately came to mind was, I knew we would ramp up YouTube. That was somewhat in progress when I got here but we knew we wanted to do a big pivot to video. We wanted to incorporate more video into our production strategy and process.
So my first thought process was to maximize our reach, revenue, and relevance. At the beginning, I was worried mostly about number one, and that was reach. How do we expand our audience in the biggest way possible? Early on that meant turning our social team into a content distribution machine.
How are people going to know that these awesome podcasts exist if they don’t exist on social? We had to dig in with the existing team to crank out more higher-end social cuts that are a little bit faster paced, have texts and graphics, and really move.
They were used simply as a marketing mechanism to get people to understand that they should consume these full-length podcasts. I think the biggest difference was learning that it’s not just a marketing play. Social content is content. Show content on social should be valued just as much as a view on YouTube or a listen on a podcast. It has the value of really ingraining itself in a culture, which we’ve seen a lot with Draymond [Green], and Shannon [Sharpe]. Colin [Cowherd] is in that space too. Richard Sherman is as well. We’ve been able to grow the profile of other people by getting them out.
So next was how do we maximize our reach and audience? How do we reach the most amount of people possible? That was again just turning our social into a content distribution machine. In addition to doing original social content, we had to be a part of the live window on NFL Sundays, on big NBA nights, creating content around that.
So it was a pretty holistic strategy all around. I don’t want to leave out the YouTube portion of it, which was obviously huge. We went from primarily being focused on the audio version of our podcasts to equal weight: How are we optimizing our video for both YouTube and social? What are we doing to package it? Are we doing enough breakout clips of single topics or multiple topics on YouTube to get the most out of every single show?
AR: So tell me a little bit about the team. How many people do you have working with you and what do you look for when bringing people on board?
MK: The skill sets on our team are really diverse. The social and YouTube team is about 10 to 15 people. We have a team of producers that work on the shows and aps. I think our entire team is around 50 people including senior staff.
There’s two or three big things that I look for when I’m looking to staff up my team. One is, do you have a unique perspective? Do you have a voice that is going to come through when you are producing a video? I think there are a lot of people that can sit down and set an in and out, export the video and say, here it is.
But what creativity do you have? What creative juices are you bringing to the edit? How are you elevating it? What are you doing to take a conversation about LeBron James and make it appealing to everyone, incorporating maybe a cultural reference, working in something from Photoshop. Again, how people’s brains work. Are they bringing a different perspective?
Everyone on my team also needs to be collaborative. That’s not just true of my team, that’s true of everyone at The Volume. I want everyone waking up on the team, excited to hop into the morning huddle, and start exchanging ideas. What are you working on today? Oh, that sounds really cool. Can I help with that? So again, people being culture setters, and wanting to work hard with the people around them. I think that’s the baseline.
AR: How about the team’s relationship with the talent? In many instances they are commanding massive audiences. How does that intersect with what you guys do on social?
MK: A lot of it depends show to show. How closely we work with Draymond Green is probably not the same as how closely we work with Jason Timpf. Jason has more time to chat about strategy and communicate on a day-to-day basis. Draymond has other things going on. The same with Shannon and Colin. I give Logan [Swaim] a ton of credit for this in terms of who we’ve gone out and looked for. It’s people who are fully bought in. You’ll notice that Draymond is all in on promoting his podcast and encouraging people to ask questions. Tweet at him so that he can talk about it on the pod.
Shannon and Chad on Nightcap are fully bought in on promoting it and trying to get people to subscribe to the YouTube channel. They’re trying to get people into the comments section so they can interact with them on the live show.
Every single one of our talent wants to maximize their growth. They’re all bought in not only on content being shared from our handles, but sharing content on their own handles too, participating in giveaways and brainstorming, both for the shows and for social. So honestly, working with them has been across the board, really rewarding.
AR: Let’s talk about how you measure success on social. You mentioned before that reach, following and engagement are huge. Aside from that, what does success look like? Where have you seen big wins?
MK: It starts with the three R’s, reach, revenue and relevance. Reach being number one for a reason, in that if you have a wide reach, you’re likely going to drive a good amount of revenue, and be pretty relevant. So expanding the reach as much as possible, and that goes across all platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, experimenting on Threads, etc.. Any platform that is going to be emerging. Snapchat is something I have a ton of experience with, and we’re having conversations right now with them about expanding our content there. Anywhere that we think that we can cultivate and generate an audience is somewhere we’re going to go.
Then in terms of revenue, our biggest play is going to be YouTube. That’s largely programmatic ads. But by having a big reach and being super relevant on social with all of these clips, we can also upsell our content.
Hey, you have a show sponsorship? You’re also going to get a social sponsorship with that. You’re not going to just get a [ad] read on the audio, you’re going to also get a video read on the video version of the podcast. You’re also going to get a sponsored clip on social that’s going to go on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, everywhere that people are consuming their content.
So maximizing our reach makes us more attractive to those brands so that we can maximize our revenue.
And then it’s about relevance. When I first started, there were a few people on the social team who, and I totally understand this cause I was the same way when I was 23-24, everyone got really territorial when anyone picked up our content. Maybe they didn’t give us the perfect credit. For me, I’m like, ‘No. Y’all. This is a win. It’s great. This is what we want. We’re getting views. We’re not even doing all the work.’
We’re trying to produce content in a way that cuts through, and get other major outlets to pick it up. We may have a clip on First Take or SportsCenter or Undisputed. Having the relevance not only in the podcast space, but across the sports landscape, that’s been hugely rewarding and something that again, by maximizing reach, we’re able to maximize relevance.
In terms of success, YouTube has been huge for us. When I first started, we were under 50,000 subs and we grew to about a half a million about a year in. We launched Draymond’s Instagram account right around the playoffs of my first year to take advantage of that. That got 100,000 followers within a month and all of a sudden that’s where a ton of our views are coming from.
TikTok has been hugely successful for us. We had someone who started off as an intern, 21 years old, running our TikTok. Now, he’s built our TikTok into a channel with 330,000+ followers. He’s now a producer and talent for us as well – Carson Breber. By empowering people to implement the best practices and do what they know best, it frees them to do their best work. That’s where their strengths on those platforms have been hugely beneficial for us.
The most recent success, which I saved for last, but certainly not least, has been this ramp up with Shannon Sharpe over the last month or 2. We inherited Club Shay Shay, which was a hugely successful podcast with over a million followers on YouTube. We worked to help grow that, but anytime you have someone like Shannon Sharpe, the question is, what more can we do, especially when people went from getting Shannon every morning for a couple of hours to a once a week podcast.
There is a gap there for that audience that we can fill. That’s how we built Nightcap with him and Chad Ochocinco. It’s been a wild ride over the last month. We reached a quarter of a million subscribers right on the one-month anniversary of launching the YouTube channel. We got to 50,000 on Instagram within a month. We’re around 50,000 on TikTok, so that ramp-up has just been amazing. It’s gone as good, if not better than I could have ever imagined. I think in the first month on YouTube, we had about 16 million views and another 60 million monthly views just on social.
That’s obviously going to be the headliner. He’s one of our biggest names with some of our biggest numbers. I’m going to add one more. Jason Timpf actually might be my favorite success story, just relative to where he started to where he is now. I want to be very, very, clear. Jason deserves all the credit in the world. He is immensely talented, smart, and an absolute grinder. When he started, he was a Lakers podcaster, blogger, and didn’t have the biggest profile.Now he has his own YouTube channel with over 20,000 subs. Just a couple of weeks ago, his videos in the playoffs were routinely over a hundred thousand views. His profile across social has risen so much. I remember the first time he told me, ‘I was DMing with Kevin Durant the other day.’ ‘I’m sorry, what now?’
AR: BSM has a strong audio-driven audience, which I feel is starting to catch up. If you create audio content, you now have a video camera in the studio. You’re generating vertical videos whether that’s [Instagram] Reels, TikToks or other stuff. You guys do it exceptionally well. What do you feel are best practices when it comes to pulling audio or video clips and where do you feel other brands still need some work?
MK: I think first and foremost, topic selection is the biggest thing. You need to know what your audience wants to hear about and talk about. That’s step one. Are you pulling the best possible clip from each episode or the best possible two or three clips? Have you identified the moments within an episode that are going to resonate with your audience?
Number two, I think is pacing. That’s something that we emphasize a lot. I’ll give a few compliments out to some other places that I think are doing it really well.
The New Heights podcast and Podcast P, if you look at their social cuts, very pacey. They really suck out all of the air. There’s a lot of jump cuts. There’s text on screen. You can slide in some cutouts or graphics, incorporate some B-roll or pictures, but keep things changing on screen so that you’re keeping the audience engaged and not losing them to the swipe up.
Let’s be honest, social media audiences have no patience for anything. I remember when we were first launched SportsCenter Snapchat, and were having conversations about how best to do it on Snapchat. That has stuck with me for the last six years.
If something on screen does not change every three seconds, you’ve lost your audience. They have swiped out. I bring that to every single social account we want to talk about. I’m not saying it should move so fast that you can’t understand what’s going on and you can’t track it. I think that’s the middle ground that can be a little bit difficult. I think sometimes you see people try to make it go so fast that you don’t understand what is happening. But again, keep the pace up and keep things on screen, changing and moving, I think we do that really well.
I feel a little bad saying that other people in the industry don’t do it as well, but I tend to think that we do it as well or better than everyone or anyone. For the most part, we talk about sports. So are you taking the right take that people are going to be interested in? Secondarily, are you showcasing your talent’s personality in a way that’s going to make people want to watch or seek out additional content? Are you making your talent look good? That matters.
The last thing that I’ll say, which I take a lot of personal pride in is that intentionally we are not going to be the place that does the clickbait headline and pull quote. We’re not going to take someone out of context because then good guests aren’t going to want to come on. That’s something that I think a lot of companies and aggregators focus on. What’s the spiciest thing we can pull out? What might make the most waves? We want to be influential and have people see our content, get excited about it and share it, but we want to do that in a positive way.
AR: We talk to a lot of people in the radio industry, and they don’t have the budget for a 10-person social staff that can be anywhere, everywhere at once. What would be your advice for a station or company that has one or two people handling social? Where would you start? What would you prioritize?
MK: I think that if you have the ability to record video, start there. I think the easiest thing to start is going to be YouTube. It doesn’t require a ton of editing. You’re essentially doing the same thing as you are on audio: in, out, here is your episode.
You do need some understanding of SEO, making sure your titles and descriptions are optimized in the best way for search. You want to make sure you’re creating good thumbnails, but that’s relatively easy to learn and it’s doable for a small team. If you have the ability to do video, I’d put your efforts into trying to get one really good cut per day. Focus on taking your best moment and making it as good as humanly possible. Establish your content as elite and people will slowly trickle in.
I think there’s always a rush to get so much content out. And, yes, if you have the ability to no pun intended, but in mass volume, get a ton of content out great. But, if it’s a bunch of subpar content, no one’s going to be looking for your show. Focus on those one or two moments that you can on to your TikToks, Instagrams and Twitters.
Within that and this is going to get into the voice on social, be organic don’t try to be a sensationalist or something you’re not. Have a voice, and develop a voice. It usually mirrors your talent. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same. But be natural. You want to engage with your audience and being templated is not the way to do that. Start with developing your voice, understand what your brand is, and show them the best possible version of your content as often as you can, knowing that resources are always an issue.
Alex Reynolds serves as Barrett Media’s Digital Director. In this role, he oversees all social media scheduling and content creation, monitoring of the brands analytics, and contributes to the brand’s newsletters, conferences, and websites. Originally from Rockville, Maryland, Alex is a passionate lacrosse fan, and graduate of Elon University. He can be found on Twitter @Reynolds14_.
