SOCIAL MEDIA ROUND-UP: Real Madrid Decide Snapchat is the Way Forward!

In this week’s social media roundup, asthma we take a look at Real Madrid’s collaboration with Snapchat and Twitter’s trial of new poll features. We also dive into Google+’s re-branding efforts and Tumblr’s introduction of a GIF-maker.

Real Madrid become the first sports team to have a Snapchat ‘Official Story’

Last week, Real Madrid achieved a social media first by becoming the first sports club to have an ‘Official Story’ on Snapchat. Official Stories provide a way to gather together a string of videos or pictures from an event into one ‘story’ for fans to then watch back and feel part of the action. 

Real Madrid’s Snapchat story was launched for the El Clasico match up between Real Madrid and Barcelona on Saturday – a game expected to draw a global audience of hundreds of millions of people across platforms ranging from TV, Twitter and Snapchat.

Snapchat and Real Madrid were looking to capture as much of the hype and atmosphere as possible from La Liga’s fiercest rivalry by involving fans at the game. The partnership was expected to encourage fans to send in their own photos and videos knowing they had a chance to feature in the ‘Official Story’, which would be broadcast to Snapchat’s user base of over 100 million.

Rafael de los Santos, Real Madrid’s Head of Digital, explained his high hopes for the partnership, saying:

“We are very keen on taking advantage of every single channel out there to communicate with our fans and capture the next generation of fan. We have 450 million fans around the world. Our goal is to reach every single one of them”.

There are likely to be a host of sports clubs looking to forge similar partnerships with Snapchat in the hope of engaging their current fan base. A partnership like this also provides an opportunity for a club to reach out to a wider audience who may not, at present, be interested in them.

Today, the French Ligue 1 club, Marseille, announced their partnership with Snapchat. This deal differs from Real Madrid’s venture as users can access exclusive video and photo content from the club. This content includes behind the scenes footage from training, videos from matches and travel as well as the curating of fan submissions from matches.

These collaborations top off a successful year for Snapchat, which has gained a reputation as the ‘fastest growing social network’ with growth of 57% in 2014. It is also an indication of the path Snapchat might be looking to go down in 2016 and the next platform sports clubs will focus on to increase their engagement with fans.

Twitter trials new poll features

Our first roundup of the month looked into the launch of Twitter’s new poll feature that enables users to create polls with two answer options.

Last week, TechCrunch reported sightings of the platform’s attempt to trial features to improve their polls, for example, enabling four answer options and extending the run-time of polls to a week instead of the current time limit of 24 hours.

We feel that extending the amount of time a poll is live will not make much difference to Twitter users with small audiences, as tweets are said to be ‘live’ for only 24 minutes. This means the poll is unlikely to be seen an hour after it was posted, let alone 24 hours or even a week!

Having said that, this feature will not be a negative addition as poll creators can check the status of their polls at any time and voters can see the poll’s score as soon as they have selected their answer.

For highly influential celebrities, sports stars or popular brands with huge reach, their tweets often get retweeted and discussed for hours after being posted, so a longer poll time could result in a far greater engagement levels.

Additionally, 54% of Twitter users do not log onto the platform every day meaning prolonging the life of polls might increase the opportunity for less frequent users of Twitter to get involved and increase their engagement with the platform.

As for increasing poll answer options, we believe this could be especially beneficial for brands. Instead of asking questions requiring vague, ‘black or white’ answers, this will enable poll creators to get a better understanding of how their audience feels towards the question posed.

However, as the average Twitter user is only online for about 13 minutes, it is important for poll creators to provide brief answers and not always use the four options unless necessary.

**UPDATE** (24th November)

Overnight Twitter rolled out one of these changes to all users. Every Twitter account should now have the option of creating polls with 4 answer options. Polls are still only live for 24 hours. It will be interesting to see if this changes over the next few days or whether Twitter decides it is not worth extending the run time of polls.