Fantasy Football, Real Social Media

I’m one of the 22 million Americans playing Fantasy Football this year. My draft was a few nights ago, so for the past several weeks, I’ve been vigorously researching depth charts, projections, match-ups, coaching changes, and everything else Fantasy Football.

While Fantasy Football may carry a reputation for fostering chromic eye strain and couch potato-ism, it can also be useful—one player mentions in the above video that his Fantasy Football endeavors provide a second income. I realized there are a lot of similarities between running a Fantasy Football team and conducting a social media marketing campaign.

So here we go! Five lessons Fantasy Football can teach you about Social Media:

1) Be patient. While some superstar players will score big points for your team in the first two weeks, others may take more time to develop. In keeper leagues, you may have to draft a rookie who won’t start until late in the year with the hopes that he will be a stud next season.

In the same way, social media’s powerful effects sometimes won’t happen overnight. You may have to wait, building a following slowly, carefully, and selectively. Hopefully, your patience will pay off in time.

2) In the words of Steelers’ Receiver Hines Ward, “I always keep my head on a swivel!” To be successful at Fantasy Football, you’ve got to stay on top of both your players and available free agent players. A new hotshot running back might emerge on the waiver wire, or one of your backups might go down with a high ankle sprain. Don’t worry. If you’re watching and listening to what’s going on every week, you can adjust and adapt accordingly.

A social media presence works the same way. Follow the conversations about your company online. Watch for and listen to what people are saying, but also be vigilant for hotshot opportunities that may emerge.

3) Strategize. Don’t go into your draft without a strategy. There are other teams in your league, so you can’t have all the best players at every position. You need to be strategic in choosing your team’s strengths and weaknesses.

With social media, you need to find your natural content creation skill. You might be a writer, photographer, PowerPoint-er, videographer, or whatever. Play your social media strategy to your strengths and feed those strengths with your weaknesses. For example, just because you can’t top Shakespeare’s writing chops, doesn’t mean you can’t have a blog with videos or photo galleries embedded. Find the right mix for you.

4) Be flexible. Don’t bank on projections. The experts rarely agree on player projections before the season starts—and for good reason! Situations change in the NFL every day. You might draft the number one stud receiver only to find out that the next week, his quarterback tears his ACL. Watch from week to week and realize how your situation is changing.

Social media needs that same flexibility. You might bank on Facebook fan pages to get you lots of fans, only to find out you get more value from a LinkedIn discussion groups. Be flexible.

5) You get what you pay for. NFL.com, Yahoo, and ESPN offer free services to run your league, which work well enough. But if you shed a few extra bucks for a membership with CBSSportsline or Yahoo premium leagues, you will get more rewarding content and more fulfilling features, like up-to-the-minute score boards!

Social media is time consuming. The more time you invest in your strategy and monitoring, the more rewarding you will find your social media experience will be.

Disclaimer: Inspiration for this post came partially from reading Richie Escovedo’s fun article explaining PR through the game of baseball.