Coming into the 2024 NFL Season, it was imperative for the organization to be set up for success. There was new coach, a new quarterback, a whole new narrative about the team. With that, the social & digital team needed to create a tone for the season. How could the Falcons show up and capitalize on the season ahead? After all, it’s critical to be able to react quickly with clear goals in this fast-paced environment.
Enter the Falcons brand voice of 2024: Southern Swag
Southern Swag encapsulates Atlanta. We are boastful yet have southern hospitality. We have diverse backgrounds, whether that’s from transplants or due to the history of our region. We are the culture. We create culture – in music, art, and motion pictures.
We felt as the football team of the “Dirty South”, we needed to be ready to make waves on the internet and it was vital with how important X is to the sports world, that we took care of business.
Our team controls nothing about what happens on the field. But what we can do, is impact how folks feel when they hear the team, Atlanta Falcons. What was our latest post that was conversational, sharable, memorable? What can we do to shape the narrative? How can we inform, yet entertain our millions of followers as well as the football community? We challenge ourselves daily to think on these topics and build out a plan to position ourselves to become the best X presence in 2024!
It was important to define our social strategy on X and our goals. We set out to be clear in our tone “Southern Swag”
The phrase provided our north star: It is who we are, how we show up and how we authentically represent our diverse fan base. How we do that is: Entertain, Engage, Be Authentic, Promote
We then set forth several goals to pursue: Interaction Rate, Total Interactions, Interactions Per Post, NFL Rank. In each of these, we were aiming for a 50% increase of the numbers and then to be in the top-10 of the NFL in interaction/engagement rate.
Throughout the year, we would monitor and track these numbers on both a weekly and monthly basis. In concert with that, we would also track what posts, media types and trends that were happening in the league and sports to see how we fit it into a version that we could amplify.
Org Goals Results:
Interaction Rate increased by +75%: 0.06% -> 0.11%
Total Interactions increased by +100%: 1,696,478 -> 3,401,376
Interactions Per Post increased by +77%: 1,464 -> 2,604
NFL Interaction Rate rank increased by +16 spots: 25th -> 9th – only team in top-10 to not be in NFL playoffs
Highest interacted post by any NFL team on X in the 2024 season: https://x.com/AtlantaFalcons/status/1853186214305698024
Second largest Engagement Rate & Total Interactions change YoY in the NFL: +75% & +100.5%
Only team to have TWO top-5 posts in interactions:
https://x.com/AtlantaFalcons/status/1853186214305698024
https://x.com/AtlantaFalcons/status/1835885091928592538
(Data is for 2024 NFL season)
