Sports and Social Media: Do Athletes Increase Engagement?

In this Marketing Report:

• Food & Beverage Brands: Forever the Winners of Sports Marketing
• Automotive: 7-Time F1 Winner Mercedes-Benz Is Not Winning at the Instagram Game
• Finance and Crypto: The New Player in the Court
• Retail: Luxury Brands Get No Luxury Engagement
• Hygiene and Personal Care: Sports Fans Are Also Hygiene Fans
• Conclusion: The Impact of Sports in Social Media Is Real
• Methodology

When do the sports gears not turn? Companies are always seeking out to partner with athletes to promote their brand and get a foot in the door. At Sortlist we had to ask ourselves: what is the true relationship between sports and social media?

More specifically, what is the effect that athletes have on brand engagement?

Food & Beverage Brands: Forever the Winners of Sports Marketing

Athletes Boost Your Instagram Engagement By 3x

In our report, a third of brands had a much higher brand engagement when they included athletes in their social media posts—above 2%—when compared to posts without them.

According to the 2022 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report by Rivaliq, the overall median engagement rate on Instagram is 0.67% across all industries.

Sprite sees an increase in engagement of nearly 30% when basketball pro Trae Young is in the feed, and Blue Coast Brewery sees an increase of 20% when Daniel Ricciardo, the F1 driver, appears in their posts.

Pasta giant Barilla takes the crown of engagement for a food brand: engagement goes up by 71% with athletes. The faces behind its sports posts? Tennis players Roger Federer and Coco Gauff.

Automotive: 7-Time F1 Winner Mercedes-Benz Is Not Winning at the Instagram Game

Finance and Crypto: The New Player in the Court

Sports Is a Social Booster for Crypto

All the finance and cryptocurrency brands in our survey see a higher engagement rate in their posts with athletes than in their posts without them, making it clear that the rookie player is here to stay.

Featuring athletes such as Naomi Osaka and Lionel Messi, MasterCard takes the lead with more than 100% engagement difference between posts with athletes versus those without, followed by financial firm The Arctic Group (48.86%) with Casper Ruud and digital currency platform Crypto.com (14.73%) with Joel Embiid.

Retail: Luxury Brands Get No Luxury Engagement

New Balance Blasts Rolex and Armani With 16% More Engagement

If you have a product aimed at general audiences, you may be interested in partnering up with an athlete or two: our latest analysis reveals that luxurious brands report negative engagement rates in sports marketing, especially when compared to non-luxurious retail brands.

Brands like Rolex (-0.08%), Bovet (-0.26%), Maurice Lacroix (-0.17%), Louis Vuitton (-0.05%), and Armani (-0.05%) all report negative engagement with their social media followers when posts involve sports athletes such as Daniil Medvedev, Naomi Osaka, and Matteo Berrettini. This is similar to what happened with Mercedes-Benz.

Compare that to lower-spectrum retail brands like Clear Hair Care (15.61%) and New Balance (18.89%), whose engagement rates are the highest in this industry.

Hygiene and Personal Care: Sports Fans Are Also Hygiene Fans

Rexona Reports 13% More Engagement Thanks to Sports

Our sports and social media report shows that, among retail brands, fans and followers engage the most with hygiene and personal care products used by athletes.

30% of our retail brands are hygiene and personal care products that have a much higher engagement in their social posts when using athletes, when compared to those without athletes. Examples include Rexona (13.43%), Head and Shoulders (6.33%), Ready 24 (5.76%), Gillette (4.27%), and Heliocare (2.69%).

Conclusion: The Impact of Sports in Social Media Is Real

If there was ever any doubt about the power of a sports athlete in a social feed, let it be put to rest: brands in certain industries can benefit greatly from using their face and name.

Tried-and-true industries like food and beverage can have an advantage if they seek to position themselves and gain visibility, while new players like crypto and car maintenance can also get a head start in the engagement race.

However, luxury brands might want to seek a different route for their social media strategy, as it appears that fans prefer to see their favourite athletes alongside less glamorous companies.

Methodology

For this report we analysed the Instagram accounts of 200 non-sports brands, between September 12th and September 16th, 2022. In the analysis, we studied posts that featured athletes and posts that did not feature athletes and compared their respective engagement metrics (number of likes, number of comments, and engagement rates) using Social Blade. We then averaged them to understand the difference in engagement between each kind of post.

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