Social Media 101 with Bleacher Report ‘Social Moments’ Executive Editor Jermaine Spradley
When creativity bleeds through your social media approach, the massive following will come in droves.
Just ask Bleacher Report’s executive editor, Jermaine Spradley. The former Huffington Post journalist joined Bleacher Report just over a year ago and has since led the charge in building a ‘Social Moments’ team that has undoubtedly changed the way sports highlights are fed to the masses through social media. By taking a once-unparalleled social approach – which has since been copied by many – BR has compiled four million followers on Twitter, just over four million on Instagram and has amassed more than six million likes on Facebook.
We sat down with Spradley to discuss Bleacher Report’s unique social media strategy (without giving too much away), the most viral content pieces from the BR barnyard so far and what he looks for in a potential social media contributor.
George Kiel: What triggered Bleacher Report’s obvious shift of focus to social media and making it unique?
Jermaine Spradley: The first thing we’re thinking about is how do we make sure that we are doing something that is differentiating from what we’ve come to expect everyone else on the Internet to do. One of the things we learned early on is that you’re not going to be the Internet at serving people highlights. When we’re looking across the landscape, we know we’re competing with, not only the other digital publishers and sports outlets in the world, but also the kids at home with their cellphones, pointing them in front of their TVs and uploading that content to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. So you can’t really win that battle; it’s an impossible battle to win. We decided pretty early on that we were gonna cede that battle to the Internet and just say, ‘Listen, you guys got that.’ Instead, what we would offer would be something that was differentiated; something that advanced the highlight; something that added context to the highlight; or something that just made the highlight a little more fun. We believe very much in trying to capture the spirit of the moments that happen in sports as opposed to capturing the actual ‘news’ of what takes place. You can go anywhere to find out who won the game; you can go anywhere to see all of the highlights of the game. But if you want to kinda see how it felt in the moment when LeBron James dunked on somebody or when Steph Curry hit his 13th three-pointer, that’s what we do at Bleacher Report.
Kiel: When did Bleacher Report really start to focus on making its social media experience different from everyone else’s approach?
Spradley: Well since its inception, Bleacher Report has always been about delivering high-quality and fan-first centered experiences around sports. Our shift to focusing on social really came about during the Fall/Winter of 2015. We kinda just saw the direction our audience was going. Our audience wasn’t really interested in being taken from Twitter. People are not always interested in being taken outside of the Twitter universe back to our bleacherreport.com website. When you’re on Twitter, you’re on Twitter, so you want a Twitter-focused experience. It’s the same thing with Instagram and Facebook. We noticed that based off of our user consumption, and we decided to stop trying to use social networks as a means of driving traffic back to bleacherreport.com. I mean, it’s still a part of what we do, but that’s not the focus of what we do on social media. Instead, we wanted to create platform-specific experiences that reflect the nuance and user expectation of all these different social networks while also reflecting the swag and voice that has come to define Bleacher Report.
Butler jumped out The Garden for this oop last night (@Filtrete) pic.twitter.com/yZAwPoTPZT
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) April 5, 2017
Kiel: How does the Social Moments Team name describe you guys as a whole?
Spradley: I think it’s reflective of what we’re trying to accomplish. The goal of our team is to own moments that matter on social media. We wanted to build a team that is A) focused primarily on social B) identify the moments that are going to matter to the audience we own and C) conceptualize pieces of content that reflect that moment accurately.
Kiel: What’s the one social moment you’re most proud of so far?
Spradley: The one that comes to mind most immediately is our Kevin Durant/free agency piece. When Kevin’s free agency opened last year on the first Friday in July, we knew it was going to be a huge moment. We knew that everyone on the Internet would be trying to create content that captured that moment. It was a fun challenge for us in that we didn’t want to do the thing that we expected all of the other digital publishers to do. We didn’t want to do just an article, or some kind of slideshow, or a video version of ‘Where’s KD gonna land?’ We wanted to do something that really reflected the moment. So I remember us sitting around in a brainstorm session and we kinda got to the point of being stuck. We couldn’t come up with anything. At the time, we were focusing on Kevin Durant, and then I remember we just stopped and I was like, ‘Well, this isn’t getting us to where we need to be, so let’s switch gears.’ So then we began to talk about what was hot on the Internet at that very moment. The first thing one of my team members mentioned was Kanye West’s Famous. Earlier that week, Kanye had just dropped the Famous music video, where he had himself, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump and all these other people laying in the bed in wax-like figures, and it had the Internet going nuts. Kanye is an artist that absolutely resonates with our audience, so we were like what if we, satirically, recreated the Famous video but KD is in the center and he’s surrounded by all these different people who represent teams that might be interested in his services in free agency? So we had Steve Kerr for the Warriors, Billy Crystal for the Clippers, Spike Lee, Steph Curry and a few others – and I just thought it was a really, really smart and well-executed piece of content. We have a couple of guys on the team who do music, so we recreated the Famous beat to make it sound just like the song and we added a couple of filters to the video. I thought it was a piece in which everything came together. We had a really smart concept that touched on two things that we felt our audience is really into: Kevin Durant and his latest free agency saga and Kanye West and his latest music video. It was a great example of how Bleacher Report sits at this nexus of sport and culture in a way that no other brand does. It was a great reflection of what we’re capable of. It did 3-4 million views on Facebook, it went crazy on Instagram, tons of people shared it. It was a pretty big success.
Kevin Durant woke up like this. #Famoushttps://t.co/XCaPu4DxgP
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) July 1, 2016
