NHL Audit - Liam O’Neil

Link to the excel sheet

https://liveduq-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/oneill1_duq_edu/EXxApejQWuZNuJ-HW9QTDAgBfzCHtuZU1Do0xSegdwG5uQ?e=4kNH75&nav=MTVfezAwMDAwMDAwLTAwMDEtMDAwMC0wMDAwLTAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMH0

Section 1

The NHL has a social media presence on basically every social media app you can think of. For the audit we focused on Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Youtube. This was an interesting audit because all of these platforms have a different demographic and they all post different things. You can go from Facebook where you have older fans arguing about the old vs the new generation of hockey stars to having younger fans spamming gifs in  the comments. The content that is receiving the most amount of traction, views and shares would be content relating to the 4 Nations Face off that just ended. After the USA and Canada played their first game last Saturday the internet erupted with overwhelming support for the USA because of all of the political drama that was added onto the game as well made it that much more exciting for some. There was a post of a hit that you could see on all platforms that went viral because of the size of the hit. The NHL also made sure to capitalize off of the three fights that happened in the first nine seconds of that game, posting that on all of their socials. This felt like the most traction hockey was getting across social media platforms in a long time. This tournament garnered more hype than even the Stanley Cup Finals normally gets.

Section 2

The comments on all of these platforms ranged from spamming about their teams winning or calling for players to be kicked off of the team for how bad they played. On platforms such as Facebook and Linkedin there was more maturity and actually had conversations and not just one-word responses. I did not notice too many responses from the NHL on either platform but on others such as TikTok there was more. I think they respond more on TikTok because it is a younger generation and if they see the actual NHL company responding they would be more likely to engage in the posts more. They could see the comments and make videos using the @ to contact the NHL so then more people will see more videos about the NHL therefore getting more attention to the game. I have seen videos of people asking for the NHL to respond on TikTok and when they do those videos get a lot of views so it is good for the game. On Instagram NHL does not respond very much to comments because it is mostly just other people  just bragging that their team won. On X they do not respond very much; they are more focused on putting out their own content with the 4 Nations face off that just finished up or Ovi about to break the scoring record. They do not respond much in the YouTube comments either because those are more long form videos or game highlights. I think they respond the most on TikTok because it is the most personable out of all of the social media that we covered.

Section 3

For this section, we were asked to ask chatGPT to basically help the NHL ideas for their social media presence. The question that chatGPT asked was “You are advising a social media strategist for the NHL. Our goal is to uncover consumer-generated content ideas for social media. Look at Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. What are your ideas?” The results that it came up with are very interesting and could actually help the NHL with engagement. The first one that it came up with that was the most interesting to me would be “Fans Skill Showcase”. This would be a trend that would let fans show off their skills showing what they can do with a puck such as trickshots or other things of that nature. They could all use the same hashtag and each team could pick a winner then the winner from each team would get tickets to a game of their choice. Then maybe after all the teams pick someone there is a fan vote for the overall winner then the winner of the whole thing could get tickets to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Another one that I liked was having fans post about their game-day rituals like things they do, things they eat, and just things like that. It would be a way to bring fans together to show off the different things that they all do and to show that they are not that much different. You could see other fanbases getting along with each other even bonding over shared experiences. There was another idea to have fans share their first game experience which would also be good because then like the game day rituals one they could talk about experiences that they both shared.

Section 4

The main things that I got from this assignment is that the NHL could do a better job of engaging with fans on other accounts that is not their TikTok. If they would reply to more fans across the board there could always be average fans who see the NHL interactions with a bunch of different people it could draw more people into the game. The second recommendation would be to run with whatever is trending at the time. They did a good job with the 4 nations face off, with marketing that so if they keep that up the game will grow. My third recommendation would be to try to get the younger demographic engaged by doing more things on TikTok or instagram to try to capture the youth eye. That is how you build life long fans. For the competing brand we will use the MLB for example I would say one thing you can take away fromt this is striking while the stove is hot, and to capitailize on your star players. It is easy to market a superstar I just think both leagues could improve in that department