Every two years, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) holds the Summer or Winter Paralympics, key tentpole moments in their calendars to engage with audiences.
But how can they engage audiences beyond these infrequent events? Fiona Wood, Strategy Director of Little Dot Sport, discusses how they were able to help the IPC continue to grow and engage its audience through a 365-day digital strategy and calendar that uses reserved rights, maximises player access and localises content where possible.
Bringing home gold on Meta’s longest-standing platform
We (Little Dot Sport) engaged the IPC’s global audiences through a video-first strategy, leaning into Facebook’s algorithmic shift to a video-first platform. This approach made use of diverse video formats, including live and long-form, providing a complementary approach to broadcast by ensuring effective use of reserved rights and live.
Facebook’s live feature was used throughout the year, outside of the Paralympic Games period, to cover qualifying events and World Cups across the federation’s more popular sports, such as Para-Athletics, Para-Powerlifting, Wheelchair Tennis and more. Additionally, the page used Facebook Premieres to broadcast live replays of historic championships, matches and moments to build hype leading up to the Summer Games.
Streaming events, such as athletics, swimming and table tennis, during the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games allowed the federation to reach a wider audience — particularly in countries like Brazil and India, that do not typically have as much broadcast coverage of the Paralympic Games as North American and European territories. Carried out with what their reserved rights allowed, this is an example of how a federation can work in tandem with their broadcast partners on digital rights to maximise reach.
Complimenting content
As part of the strategy, we published a range of content types that are available across all platforms, with a particular emphasis on video content — both long and short-form. The federation coupled live videos with long-form video content, using compilations or past-event replays, resulting in the average video length of 37 minutes — a leading benchmark compared to other federations. Throughout the year, the Facebook page focused live streams, premieres, long-form compilations and archive clips over three minutes long, that celebrated and relived the best moments from the past Games, as well as the year’s qualifying rounds and events.
The team also took a reactive approach during and after the highly anticipated Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, by publishing long-form content of big wins and buzzworthy moments to capitalise on the excitement of the competition.
With the social media landscape always evolving, thanks to disruptors like TikTok, it’s essential to integrate new platform features into your content strategy as early as possible. While a new feature might appear experimental at first, the faster you can adopt it, the sooner you will reap the benefits when the platform has fully developed it.
And if there was one thing Instagram made crystal clear over the past year, it was: publish Reels or get lost in the algorithm. The platform announced that they were now a video-first app, the semi-demise of IGTV and that all videos would now be shared as Reels, sparking a seismic shift in the way federations need to approach their Instagram strategy.
The team ensured the IPC took early advantage of this algorithmic change and excelled in growing audiences through their Reels strategy, maximising its personality-led content and humorous Reels throughout the year, which went on to often outperform IPC’s other content.
Driving success and measurement
The strategy and implementation adopted for the IPC saw that live events drove interest, long form video content performed extremely well and creating personality-led content set the IPC apart from other sporting federations. To benchmark and evolve the success of this approach, we utilised our proprietary methodology – the Digital Connections Score (DCS) – to provide a social health check for the IPC against other sports federations.
The results provide a definitive view on what drives meaningful audience engagement and sustained growth to deliver measurable business objectives. Each social media platform has their own ways of reporting, they have different levels of accessible data and what success looks like varies from platform to platform. The DCS tackles the challenge many have with social media reporting by providing a benchmarking methodology which is agnostic across all platforms and creates a holistic way of reporting.
The overall score is calculated from several combined metrics which come together to evaluate the key areas of a brand’s content strategy. These metrics are called: Sow, Nourish and Grow.
- SOW – ENGAGEMENT – SCALE OF AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIPS: The Sow metric measures both the absolute scale of views and quality engagements as well as the engagement rates of a brand’s social account.
- NOURISH – NURTURING RELATIONSHIPS – FREQUENCY, CONSISTENCY, FORMATS: Nourish measures how effective a brand is at nurturing their fan base. Looking at post frequency consistency and use of different creative formats.
- GROW – FANS – ENSURING SOCIAL AUDIENCES ARE GROWING – Grow measures the rate at which an account is adding fans, subscribers or followers, and reaching beyond its existing audience.
How the IPC compared to other sports?
Using the DCS as a benchmark, the IPC excelled across Sow, Nourish and Grow, with its success coming from three main areas:
1. Using live to drive interest
2. Balancing long form VOD
3. Creating personality-led content
This digital benchmarking against other Sports Federations enables the IPC to holistically review its strengths and weaknesses across social media. The results provide expert guidance on how we evolve the strategy moving forward and keep the federation a step ahead of the competition.
The strategy and implementation adopted for the IPC saw that live events drove interest, long form video content performed extremely well and creating personality-led content set the IPC apart from other sporting federations.
Fiona Wood, Strategy Director of Little Dot Sport
The full DCS report can be downloaded here.
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