Philadelphia 76ers Media Audit
The Philadelphia 76ers are a professional basketball team competing in the Eastern Conference of the NBA. As a lifelong fan of this team and an active follower of their social media channels, I chose to look at the Sixers brand because it is one that I know well. The 76ers utilize Instagram, Tik-Tok, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Snapchat, and Spotify for various purposes and to varying levels of effectiveness.
The Sixers Instagram account @sixers currently has 3.8 Million followers. The page is updated regularly, with at least one post on almost every day of the season. Post content includes highlight plays, sports photography, graphic announcements, as well as occasional ‘fun’ content with players. The teams most liked recent post was a valentines day post with players faces photoshopped onto valentines day cards.
On Twitter, again @sixers, the team has 2.2 million followers. There have been 73k tweets from the team’s verified Twitter account. Twitter is by far the teams most active platform for discussion, and consistently garners more comments than any other platform the brand is on. Despite this, the Sixers twitter page gets significantly less likes/retweets than the Instagram page. I think this is in part because unlike Instagram, when you like a Twitter post it gets publicly placed on your profile, causing people to be less inclined to actively ‘like’ things. Consistently, the most liked posts on the Sixers twitter are graphics announcing wins, while the most commented posts are graphics announcing losses.
Tik Tok
The 76ers Tik Tok, @sixers, has 854.1k followers and 8.3 Million likes. The team utilizes Tik-Tok for more personal content, often following Tik Tok trends to create comedic and interactive content with team members. The most popular recent Tik Tok post from the sixers was of several members of the team doing the pass the phone challenge.
Despite having 1.84 million followers on Facebook, the Sixers Facebook account consistently has poor engagment with very few likes or comments on most posts. Additionally, the account is inconsistent about posting, with some days having multiple posts and some weeks having no posts.
Spotify
The Sixers use Spotify to distribute the 76ers Insiders Podcast. This podcast is run by the teams media and covers the ins and outs of the Sixers throughout the season. The podcast posts episodes regularly, with releases generally coming every couple days. The most recent episode was towards the end of January as the hosts were given some time off until after the All-Star break.
Snapchat
The Sixers have a verified snapchat account with 159k subscribers. When the Sixers launched their snapchat it was extremely active for several years. Most notably, up until a couple years ago, the Sixers snapchat was run by Christian Crosby who frequently posted content and became well known among Sixers fans. After Christian Crosby left to launch his design start up, the Sixers snapchat stopped being as active, only posting the occasional video of inside the stadium on gameday.
The Sixers organization has a LinkedIn page. It has 45,962 followers, making it by far the companies least followed social media platform. There are only 2 standard posts ever on the Linkedin page, both of them advertising job openings for something sixers related. Both posts have under 10 combined likes and comments. The Sixers occasionally post video content on their Linkedin but it is too infrequent to be noteworthy.
David Connuck