Bolton Wanderers Football Club recently piloted  with Social Asking to engage with their audience and fan base. We created a digital fan engagement strategy for the football club which allowed their marketing team to find out about preferences on football kits. We provided an interactive survey which was posted to social media to gather valuable insights, with ratings from 0-100 for granular insight into how much people liked it. As well as numeric ratings, the survey also asked open-ended questions with the help of “Smart filters” that helped count popular topics.

Re-engaging fans – how we did it

The process was very simple and involved 4 key steps. Let’s break them down.

Proposed a social media campaign strategy

A social media campaign strategy was proposed to help boost digital fan engagement for the football club. This involved creating an interactive survey to get feedback on six new football kits, as well as providing a platform for fans to engage with each other and discuss opinions. The campaign took place over a week, between August 19th and August 26th.

Launched a custom branded domain

We then launched a custom branded domain for the Bolton Wanderers team, which they could post to any social media platform. This landing page was built off their existing colours, logos fonts and styles. It was then posted on Facebook, where fans were encouraged to choose the upcoming football kit used by the club and voice their opinions on why they chose a specific kit.

Invited fans to take part in an interactive survey

Fans were invited to take part in the survey where across the week, they chose to rate from ‘love it’ or ‘not for me’ options regarding each t-shirt design for both home kits and away kits. To enhance sports fan engagement, our survey software allowed fans to leave comments under each of the shirt options with information on both the home and away kits, detailing what they liked and didn’t like so much. Statistics are useful but collecting additional data via comments enhances the connection between the football club and the fans, where they appreciated that their opinions were being recognised

There were also polls included, asking several useful questions to give Bolton Wanderers unique insights into their fan base, and to get users to stick around to help seed discussion points. Some of these questions included:

• Our current blue away kit has hit record-breaking sales! What impressed you most about it?
• Do you own any Wanderers shirts?
• Should we let fans choose the kit from now on?
• What features do you look out for when a new kit launches?

Shared insights with a custom report

Once the campaign concluded, a custom report was generated, sharing insights on metrics including visitors, gauges, polls, comments, and unique topics. This was a great way for them to get meaningful, actionable insights to help them choose their upcoming football kit to make the widest fan base happy.

Here are some of the results Social Asking achieved for the Bolton Wanderers campaign:

• 70 comments in the first 3 minutes
• 300 comments in the first hour
• 1,000 comments in 4 hours
• 2,300 comments in 4 days
• 2,600 comments overall
• The portal was open for a week and had over 40,000 fan visitations with 91% of users accessing this via mobile.

With a bit of help from the club promoting the campaign previously on their social media, the campaign achieved incredible results. In total, they had received 47,700 interactions as well as 5,900 voters on their polls.

The insights report allowed the team to spot key takeaways, publish findings and share data with their colleagues. View an example of one of our previous digital fan engagement reports to see an example data report brimming with insight.

Join our pilot solution

It’s no secret that engaging with fans is a great way for them to feel valued and more likely to support your sports team. So why not try Social Asking for your digital fan engagement? Our easy-to-use platform engages audiences to create lively discussions, collect feedback and poll opinions that support fans involvement and commercial decision making.

Sporting organisations can use this as a direct way of engaging with supporters and fans without the chaos that traditional social media platforms bring. Unlike other platforms, all of the data collected is the property of the clubs and their fans.

If you’re interested in using Social Asking for your sports club/organisation to improve your fan engagement, schedule a meeting with us today.