Today’s edition of Social Studies features my conversation with the Director of Social Media at Front Office Sports Mason Burgin. If you missed any of my prior conversations during this series, click here. We’ve picked the brains so far of social stars from Jomboy Media, The Volume, and AM 570 LA Sports.
Mason Burgin got his start in sports media in college doing photography and videography for the University of Tennessee. Jobs in “social media” were just becoming a thing while he was at UT. Upon graduating, he began his career with the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans as a social media associate. When COVID hit, Mason was looking for new opportunities which is how he got connected with Front Office Sports.
As another publisher covering a subsection of sports, I really wanted to dive in on FOS’ approach to content and audience building on social media. We got into the weeds on engaging sports fans on various platforms, balancing organic posts with revenue-driving content, and growth strategies. If you’re in publishing this is the conversation for you.
Be advised our 30+ minute conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. For the full conversation, check out the Barrett Media YouTube page.
Alex Reynolds: Take me through a typical day in your world.
Mason Burgin: I have one alarm set for 5:45 where I do an initial scan to make sure nothing absolutely insane happened while I was asleep. Then I’ll get up around seven and try to have two or three, what I feel like are solid posts scheduled for that 7am to 8am window which is a big opportunity for us. From there, we have an editorial meeting around 9am with our writers, editors, social staff, and podcast team. We kind of align where we feel the headlines are for the day. From there, it’s really all content creation in the morning
I meet with the social team (of three) around noon to map things out for the next few days. Then afternoon is a little slower for the most part. Usually meetings, and scheduling things for busier future events.
I try to wrap up by 5:30 CT. We schedule posts across all the platforms half hour or so through the day, through like 8 or 9pm. We’ll check back in, keeping an eye on things. That’s kind of the nature of the job. But we’ll check later in the evening, and maybe fire off one or two more things.
AR: What are those types of stories that you see come across the site that you’re like, alright, this will make great social content?
MB: That’s one of my favorite things about what we do. What FOS does is a pretty clear lane of content, where I feel a lot of brands in the sports media space now, the lines blur on what they cover. Or they just try to cover everything. That feels difficult to me and makes the space really clouded.
Initially, a lot of that had to have a dollar figure in it. But we were able to expand it a little bit to where we started to include things adjacent to the business of sports. So you know, directly that’s money. Indirectly, that’s innovation, historical hires, and achievements of any kind from an organization.
At the root of it, it’s always, what are people responding to positively or what’s getting engagement? I’m not going to keep posting something, even if I feel like it’s important, if no one cares about it or it feels like no one cares about it.
I think the biggest one for me, that I’m able to point back to is athlete-driven human interest stories. I think people are always interested and want to see more of what athletes are doing. They like hearing more of their stories off the field. It’s easy to talk about teams as a whole or giant billion-dollar corporations but I think when I’m able to be like, ‘Tyler, Lockett is an all-pro wide receiver for the Seahawks but he also has his own real estate firm, and he’s now the official real estate agent of the Seahawks,’ people don’t know that stuff. It’s extremely fascinating.
AR: What’s your sort of strategic approach to growing that audience on different platforms?
MB: I wish there was an easy 30-second to minute answer where I could say, ‘This is what we do. And this is how you add followers.’ I think my approach has always been to just build up a stockpile of interesting content. We try to get to the point where someone says, ‘Okay, I have to see what’s next. And I have to see it from FOS.’ And that’s strictly from a social perspective, we have an incredible editorial staff that is like almost doing that for us.
We’re trying to become a place where people are like, ‘all of this is really interesting and no one else is covering it well enough.’ I think women’s sports are an easy place to point to in terms of lack of coverage. Those posts do incredibly well. The audience is there, and when you give them the platform, they respond. That’s a roundabout way to get to growth. From a content perspective, it’s building up all of that to a point where people don’t really have a choice but to follow FOS.
AR: So when you’re getting all this unique content from the site, how do you then determine what’s going to be a good play on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter(X)?
MB: A lot of other brands in the space will take something and distribute it across every platform. And if it’s a big enough story, that’s great. But we have always really prided ourselves, on curating things to each audience on each platform because they’re so different.
[For example Dickie V’s recovery] That’s something that at the root of is not an insanely strong business story. It’s more of a human interest story. I know a LinkedIn audience or our Facebook audience is going to appreciate that more than a Twitter (X) audience. So we were able to that and curate it for LinkedIn, where stories there are rooted in personal success, personal comeback and cool stories around people.
On Twitter everyone’s updating. ESPN Bet launches today, here’s the news around an offensive coordinator getting fired, things like that. Sometimes it can feel almost like you’re out of the loop if you’re posting something that doesn’t fit in that news cycle.
Instagram is so aesthetically driven and it’s also much easier to pull evergreen content for. If done incorrectly, it can feel like you’re digging up an old viral clip and recycling it. But me and Jeremy my coworker is really, really good at this. We like to dig back to find old things that maybe people have forgotten about it and tell the story in a new way.
AR: How do you strike the balance between doing organic content, stuff that’s eye-catching and easy to engage with versus things that drive revenue, like the newsletter, podcasts and website and story links?
MB: I approach it almost like I’m trying to maintain a live audience. I think about it as like, ‘Okay, they just saw this really cool thing. That’s great. I’m glad they liked it. Now I need to incorporate editorial from today.’ We almost try to alternate editorial content and organic content.
I should not be able to get on our platform and see that our timeline is just 10 links in a row. Because then it’s going to annoy people and they’re going to leave. At this point it has become almost 50/50.
AR: Overall, how do you measure success on social with FOS? What metrics are you looking at? And how do you take that, internalize it, and then develop a growth strategy from it?
MB: We have three or four annual goals that the social team is aspiring for. The first is cross-platform followers, trying to establish the audience, across every platform. We’re trying to hit a million [cross-platform followers] by the end of this year.
We measure a lot of our posts by impressions. That’s something that partners really care about. We’re able to go to partners and tell them that last month we did 200 million monthly impressions across social and internally that’s what we use as a barometer for success.
Another one of our annual goals is establishing social franchises, recurring series that we can sign partners to. So we just launched, with a lot of help from our creative strategy team, a series called Under Review with Adam Breneman, essentially weekly recaps around college football that we’re hoping to launch with a partner here in the next couple weeks.
We’ve kind of almost hit that first step of audience established, engagement established, now we’re able to roll out stuff that we feel like is still organically interesting, but also that we can marry partner dollars into on a weekly basis.
I personally incorporate engagement rate into a lot of what I consider to be successful or important. I think there are a lot of names in the industry with large audiences that get way more engagement. And so that’s great. But I like to think that almost every post that we put out is fascinating to our readers and audience. We pride ourselves on having an audience that’s really engaged and loyal to what we do.
AR: What do you feel the biggest keys are in developing text-based material into strong social content?
MB: You don’t want your readers to feel click-baited when you’re plugging a story. There are sites that will do that. You know, “click here for the answer” and things like that. We try to avoid that.
When we try to drive people, and I actually got this from Mr. Beast of all places, he always talks about delivering whenever he says he’s going to do something. He has thumbnails and headlines, “This time I filled my house with a million marbles.” And then he will actually fill his house with a million marbles versus accounts that say something and then you watch the video, you’re like, ‘Where’s the part where they did this is what I clicked for.’
When we build stuff, I want people to leave feeling like they got what they came for. Scroll through and learn about this thing for the first time. But also if I say ‘Hey, link bio,’ and they’re like, ‘Okay, I will go to your bio and click this post’ they get to the story. I’m not overpromising on something. I’m actually giving them valuable information about something that they feel like they’ve been rewarded for following, engaging and reading.
AR: For FOS, the money is in traffic, right? That’s how you pay your bills. Do you see social as almost like a sort of different approach? Like it’s not always about driving traffic, it’s more about like building a brand identity?
MB: Yes. For some platforms I’d even argue that it’s not at all about driving traffic. TikTok, I think is a good example. For the most part, people are not on TikTok to read articles. We’re not getting traffic dollars from that directly. But maybe we build a really cool franchise that lives on TikTok and that franchise has a partner. Now we are getting dollars.
We know that people aren’t getting on TikTok to see commercials. So we want to make it feel like something that would live on TikTok organically.
Over time, people follow, and you establish an audience. Then you’re able to do almost whatever you want with the audience. But it’ll never come if you’re obsessed with prioritizing the wrong things on the wrong platforms.
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_.
