This week’s edition of Social Studies features Amanda Anderson, ESPN’s Senior Director of Social Media. Anderson started with the network right out of college in 2011. When she started with the social team they primarily focused on Facebook and Twitter with Instagram being the “new platform.” Now she oversees an expansive team that works directly with tech companies, teams and athletes to stay on the cutting edge.
In this interview Anderson discusses ESPN’s social media KPIs, partnerships with athletes and how a ubiquitous sports brand like ESPN approaches audience expansion. We also dive into the Creator Network which comes to Bristol February 28th and the value of influencer marketing in sports media.
Note that this interview was conducted on February 16th and has been edited for brevity and clarity. Visit the Barrett Media YouTube Page for the full conversation.
AR: What does the sort of typical day at ESPN in your role look like?
AA: I’m so multifocal focused. I’ll use today as an example. Today we were celebrating a huge part of our efforts that we’ve been planning for more than a month, which was Caitlin Clark, and her moment last night. We started to see the likelihood that she would be breaking this record and we had a full team-wide brainstorm the first week of January to start the build up for it.
So today, I started by doing a clean sweep of all of our content and looking at the numbers. We have a Slack channel. We’re big slack users on the social team that we call ‘Crush Bucket.’ That’s where we celebrate all of our wins and highlight and shout people out for leading an event or discovering an amazing piece of content.
One of the highlights last night was how many different athletes rallied around ESPN content about Caitlin. That was my morning – let’s celebrate this, let’s make sure my leader sees that. Let’s celebrate that we owned a moment that wasn’t on ESPN, it wasn’t ‘ours’ necessarily. But we really brought all the creative energy and creative juices to be a gathering place for athletes and sports fans alike around that moment.
Another big part of my job from an ops standpoint, is engaging all of our partners so right before this, I was on a call with Meta talking about new events that they have coming up some potential collaborations, engaging them around our Creator network, so they can help elevate the creators that we’ve selected in this class using their platform.
Then it’s on to hiring development and one-on-ones. Managing people is such a huge part of any leader on the social team’s job. That’s really important because so many employees on our team, it’s their first job. They’re very young and very hungry, so molding and investing in the energy that they bring and showing them the ropes of how to succeed in a corporate company like ESPN (Disney) is a big passion of mine. It’s really a point of emphasis for our entire team.
AR: So let’s dive in a little more specifically. What do those wins actually look like? Which numbers do you look at and then take to your higher ups?
AA: The obvious KPI and we say it constantly is engagement. So there’s more nuance to it than that. Because ESPN and our team is so focused on so many different sports properties and leagues and sport verticals, how we celebrate that and what engagement looks like varies, and what’s considered success varies.
We know that a women’s volleyball post on ESPN isn’t going to engage at the same rate that a Steph Curry post will and that’s fine. So I would just say engagement is our North Star but we get a lot more nuanced and sophisticated. It’s not just a simple, “our average on ESPN or SportsCenter on Instagram is this, anything above that is a success, and anything below that is not.”
Audience expansion which is such a big part of all of our roles, and mine in particular, especially with regard to women’s sports, or underrepresented sports, which is what we’re trying to account for in the Creator network. We have so many more layers of numbers to say, ‘Hey, did this post about Caitlin Clark, get more people to follow [ESPN] W?’ That’s an added layer besides over indexing. We’re often getting a lot more granular than that. But engagement is a good starting point to say how many fans took action on this? How did it move them in such a way that they had to do something with it? Like, comment, share, etc.
AR: Tell me a little bit about the Creator network, and how the importance of micro-influencer marketing plays into that strategy.
AA: Everyone who works in social knows the importance of creators in the space. With the fans that are coming up, we’re increasingly seeing these younger cohorts identify less and less as avid fans. At the same time, this younger generation, the majority of them are looking to influencers for guidance on how they spend their time, money, and what shows they’re watching. We want ESPN to be at the forefront of that conversation and top of mind, even for people who maybe aren’t sports superfans – who we at ESPN serve really, really well.
This year’s class is all female, which is new from last year, and what we’re hoping to do with the Creator Network is serve not only the super fans, of which there are many, but we’re also trying to find new ones and use the power of sports and storytelling to help new fans connect with either the athletes, teams or creators themselves that look like them. So it’s multifaceted – our approach of what we’re trying to do with this group.
AR: In terms of leveraging personality to reach people, tell me how the social team works in conjunction with ESPN talent who are commanding really big audiences themselves.
AA: It’s the same approach where, Stephen A. Smith, Adam Schefter or Lachina Robinson are talking about something, a fan is going to connect with them like they would a friend, fellow fan or teammate. It’s done in a way that a brand just doesn’t have that versatility and flexibility. And one doesn’t have to compete with the other, we want to do both.
So with our talent strategy, it’s that same goal of how are we connecting with fans in a person-first approach. That is going to be really effective in a different way than our brand handles. It deepens the connection and allows and affords a lot more unique distinction and flexibility, like what a talent can say as their opinion is not the same as a social brand that’s speaking for a large company.
AR: How do your partnerships with athletes play out on social?
AA: Being able to align, as I mentioned before with the Caitlin Clark example, athletes rallying around our content helps us stay relevant. That helps us keep our brand distinct. One example I would offer is, we worked with Mikayla Schiffer last year when she broke the All-Time World Cup wins record. We got ahead of that well in advance, spoke with her agent, and were able to create a storytelling piece that talked about her whole journey and comeback after the Olympics.
Ultimately, that resulted in a collab from espnW to her own handle. Again, it helps us target and be more precise with who we’re reaching. Everyone who is a fan of Mikayla is going to rally around that story from her brand standpoint. And then on the espnW side, we may be telling people about Mikayla’s story that aren’t alpine skiing superfans. So we look at it as mutually beneficial. When we’re able to collaborate with athletes, we’re able to establish ourselves with the fans of that athlete. And on the flip side, maybe create new fans who are less familiar with them with our brand handles that are trying to serve everyone.
AR: So as you mentioned, you’ve been at ESPN since you graduated college. Can you tell me about your experience and how social media at ESPN has shifted over that time?
AA: Oh my gosh, it’s evolved so much. This is kudos to our leader, SVP Katie Daly, who had the vision for this group. She has always seen it as an extension and a way to reach fans in a unique way. When I started, we were programming, primarily Facebook and Twitter and Instagram was like the new thing. At the time, everyone working on social media was also working on other parts of ESPN digital.
It’s amazing to see how it’s evolved from a handful of people in a scrappy, startup-mentality environment working on just the ESPN account and maybe two or three others to now where we are programming 20 different brand accounts on six different platforms 24/7. The fact that it requires an ops management team that I oversee now is just wild.
I like to think that we’re the best of both worlds. We still maintain the scrappiness, hustle and competitive drive as a startup but now they have established it to be a revenue producing and generating group that’s only rising in the amount of fans we’re able to reach.
AR: Does that start up mentality lead to a need to be on the cutting edge? What does innovation look like?
AA: Something we remind our own internal partners outside of the social group is that the platform’s are changing their algorithms and what’s prioritized. They’re rolling out new capabilities all the time. It can be frustrating sometimes to partners when they say, ‘hey, we’d like to collaborate with you on social and the story. Does this thing that we talked about six months ago, is this still what you want to do?’ And oftentimes the answer is like, ‘nope, actually. TikTok is now testing out horizontal video and eight months ago, we said give us everything vertical.’
So we really pride ourselves on being quick to experiment with and be like scientists to some degree of learning the platforms. No one hands us a playbook. So it’s on us to figure it out. And we know that the playbook is constantly evolving. Instagram Reels is another example where at one point it’s really hot and other times we’ll pivot our strategy to a carousel format, depending on what we’re seeing. And that just changes so quickly.
So what does that do for a team’s mentality? No one is ever complacent. And no one ever wakes up and says, I know exactly what’s going to hit today and what works, because there’s always this standard of evolution.
AR: You touched on some of the innovations and things that you’re working on right now. But outside of those, what are the big goals on social in 2024?
AA: Audience expansion is a big one. Finding new fans is our primary focus especially on youth sports and youth fans. Women through the lens of women’s sports and female sports fans is another huge area of focus for us. We measure ourselves every year on certain areas of engagement. So every account will have its own follower goals. Every account will have its own average engagement rate every year.
The other thing that is a constant goal is responsibility. We measure ourselves in trying to up our approach around women’s history. Black History Always is in our internal corporate branding for February. We have leads established every month and we’re always trying to up the game and increase what we’re doing with storytelling. One thing that we’ve learned since this has become a consistent part of managing social is how to show up in these spaces authentically while increasing our storytelling, experimentation and overall reach.
We rally around events like Black History Always, Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day and AAPI [Heritage Month] and now because we’ve been doing it for several years, we create content that performs above our averages. It’s not just like checking a box. We want our storytelling and the ways we show up in those spaces to be empowering. We want to move a fan with what we’re telling them to be a part of change, or to educate them about a trailblazer or a pioneer in sports that maybe they were less familiar with and be inspired by.
That’s a big component outside of the obvious, reach a lot of people and grow and find new fans, but also do it in a way that is reflective of our brand authentically.
AR: Where do you see the social space going forward?
AA: I think that there will be even more platforms. We’ve sort of seen the emergence of TikTok and other platforms emerge, like BeReal and Discord. It’ll be interesting to see where brands decide to be.
One thing we’ve learned as the social space has become more established is that the strategy is not the same for every platform. Therefore, if you’re operating with a small team, or even, let’s say one person, it’s more valuable, for you to be in one space, doing it really well, and connecting with fans in an intentional way, versus what many of us working in this social industry experience, trying to be everywhere, and maybe only doing a 20% effort.
I think more brands and social platforms are going to emerge. That seems like a given. Whether that number doubles or triples, I think brands will have to make harder decisions about where they can feasibly show up in a way that’s having impact from a reach and revenue standpoint.
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_.
