BurntFaceMan

Not sure what you're talking about DC2. I think you're trying to make some sort of point but it isn't very clear.

Bored now.

No, I haven't. I have said that you need a relevant base as a launch pad, but your overall reach is many times bigger than your initial launch pad. If you start with 500 speedway fans and reach over 150,000 people then it is anything but an echo chamber. An echo chamber would only reach the initial 500 fans.

There are so many things wrong with your logic, but it is crystal clear to me now that you simply do not understand how social media works in the slightest. To say social media is an echo chamber is one of the most out of touch things I've ever heard. It doesn't matter if you posted the video to a page with 1000 times the followers of SpeedwayGB. It wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference if the initial audience is not relevant. However, I am an expert in this industry and I'd be happy to correct you on any point you'd like to try and make. First of all, Twitter and Facebook aren't comparable. Twitter is not the marketing powerhouse that Facebook is. Twitter is dominated by celebrities and athletes. That's not to say that Twitter isn't an effective marketing platform or that businesses will not maintain a presence there, it is simply to say that it is not the ideal platform for this kind of promotion. And yes, we know speedway riders are athletes, and it's perfect for their personal profiles, but not for promoting a sport in general. Not to mention Twitter doesn't offer half the features that Facebook does in terms of insights, data collection and targeting. Right, to address your post, what percentage of those 537,000 people do you think are speedway fans? Would you say it is even as much as 5%? I mean honestly I doubt it's even that high, but for arguments sake let's assume it is. It is essential that you master the algorithm or you will have zero success. Say I have a page with 1,000,000 sports followers and 5% of them are speedway fans. I then go and post an exciting video about speedway. Facebook will then display that post to a small percentage of our followers to "test the water". The level of interaction that post receives will determine how many more followers that post is then shown to. Now say Facebook show this post to 1% of your followers, which in this scenario is 10,000 people. The number of speedway fans who see it is (assuming it's as high as 5%) is 500 people. Generally you can bank on approximately 25% of your reach interacting with your post. So in this scenario you can expect approximately 125 reactions, be it likes, shares, comments, etc. In the eyes of Facebook this post has been displayed to 10,000 people, but only 1.25% have interacted with it. Therefore the algorithm decides that this post is not worthy of competing with the hundreds of other posts vying for a position on your timeline and effectively instantly fizzles out. Now imagine if instead that post was shared to a page like SpeedwayGB, and in this scenario SpeedwayGB had 50,000 followers. Now say Facebook show this post to 1% of your followers, which in this scenario is 500 people. The number of speedway fans who see it is now 100%. Generally you can bank on approximately 25% of your followers reached interacting with your post, so now this post that was seen by 500 people has been interacted with 125 times. In the eyes of Facebook this post has been displayed to 500 people and 25% of those have interacted with it. The algorithm therefore decides that this post is hot, relevant or interesting. It is therefore worthy of a position on your timeline and Facebook will then increase the number of your followers who will also see that post. Now say that in total Facebook shows your post to 25% of all your followers, and 25% of those go on to interact with it. That's 3125 different people. The average Facebook user has 388 friends. I don't have that many, but it is the average. Let's say that Facebook then goes on to show just 15% of your friends that you have interacted with that post. That's 158,000+ people who have never seen speedway before, getting the chance to watch this video, and in turn, the chance to like the page themselves. Not only have you grown the page following ready for your next big post, but you've also reached over 150,000 people who before now had never even heard of speedway. If you make that video exciting enough, who knows how many of them will like the page? How many of them will watch more online? How many of them will see their local match advertised on the page and pop down with some friends to watch? The algorithm is simple. You need a large number of interactions on a post to boost the amount of people who see it. A page that is comprised only of speedway fans can generate a large number of interactions as the post is relevant to the audience, whereas a page with only a small number of speedway fans cannot generate a large number of interactions and therefore the snowball effect does not take hold. Additionally, how is sharing a clip of Tai speaking Scouse going to attract anybody to the sport? Nobody knows who Tai is. I'm a speedway fan and even I wouldn't be interested in watching something so boring. You need quality content that people will want to watch, and it absolutely cannot require any prior knowledge to be enjoyed. This is a screenshot of last months reach on one of the social media pages I represent: This particular page has under 100,000 followers, and yet over the course of the month we reached well over 2 million people and generated over £1,000,000 revenue in that period alone. Not only that, but as you can see from the graph above it was entirely organic. We didn't spend a penny to achieve that. Social media is anything but an echo chamber. In fact it is the single most valuable tool any business has access to during this era. The companies that embrace social media, learn it's ways and understand how to extract the best from it will succeed. The companies with ignorant and closed minded mentalities like yours will flounder and unfortunately it appears speedway is settling in down that route. Next?

Well first of all they haven't been working to promote SpeedwayGB or attendance of matches, they have been working to promote viewers on their channel. I haven't seen any speedway posts from BT Sport and neither of us know how successful those posts have been for them or how many new followers they generated, so I couldn't comment on it. The one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that social media marketing does work, and denying that it works is like denying that air exists because you can't see it. The evidence is all around us.

I have spoken to Matt in the past but it fell on deaf ears. I have spoken with Keith Chapman recently and he was interested but I haven't had chance to explore it any further yet. I am however working on a very exciting project with Wayne at Go Speed but I cannot say much about it at the moment. Hopefully I'll have a lot more to talk about soon.

You might think you do, but it's very unlikely that you do. At very least you're in the minority. The only control you have is to unfollow a page or person. Just take a look at any Facebook page and it will clearly show you how many people like the page and how many people follow it. For example, take a look at SpeedwayGB. They currently have 16,323 likes, of which 16,065 of those are following them. That means that less than 1.6% of their followers actually elect to filter out their posts. So even if you do filter 99% of it, you're in the under 2% who do, and social media marketers aren't trying to target the likes of you anyway.

Facebook controls what you see on your timeline. It's a selection of content that Facebook selects for you based on the popularity of the content, how often you interact with certain pages and the content which advertisers have paid to deliver directly to you.

And what is the source of this news?

Haha I know you're joking, but it's actually a very interesting point. If you were to see every single post of every single friend or page you like on Facebook, you'd never get through them each day! That's where the Facebook algorithm kicks in. Facebook only shows you a small percentage of content from the pages and people you like each day. Facebook will generally show you a selection of the most popular content (which is why it's so important to get interactions on your posts such as likes, comments and shares), and a selection of paid content which advertisers pay Facebook to ensure you see.

It's a drop in the ocean. Not only that, but you're targeting bike fanatics. Most of them probably already know of speedway. It's a waste of money for a minuscule return. It would be like handing out leaflets in a butchers for bacon. We need to stop this 90's approach to marketing and move with the times. That's not to say it's not a good idea, it's just that we need to stop spending big for small returns, and start being more tactical with our approach to marketing and attracting a younger audience.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how social media marketing works. It's not voodoo, it's a tried and tested formula that will grow the sport. A speedway themed coffee shop in Poole will only attract the old codgers that are already attending every week, whilst the young hip market you're trying to reach is sat in the Starbucks down the road scrolling through Facebook on their mobile phone. Before you get started... this is a long post. But for those who aren't aware of how exactly social media works, it should prove an interesting read for you. So the question... How do you get the message outside of speedway regulars who are likely going to be the only people who follow Poole on Twitter/Facebook? Every time you interact with something on Facebook, whether it be a like, comment or share, those items are then also shown to your friends. Say you have 200 friends on Facebook, and you click the like button on a cat video, your one like therefore has the potential to reach your 200 friends. Say 2 of those friends also like that video, and they have 200 friends each, there is now another 400 people who have seen your post. In the industry we call this "reach". Now say all the clubs start promoting the Speedway GB Facebook page. It is being printed in every programme, it's being shown on every electronic display board and the announcers at every single club are telling you at each meeting to visit the Speedway GB Facebook page and hit that like button. Maybe you encourage them by saying that every month one lucky follower will win a family ticket? Merchandise? Etc. Now say you've managed to build that page up to 50,000 followers. They've already got 16,000 followers so it's more than doable. You then create a short (professional, none of this amateur tosh) 60 second clip packed full of all the best bits of speedway. Some epic passes, some fighting between the riders, some scenes of packed grandstands, a few big crashes, and you share that to your Facebook page. Now your 50,000 followers interact with the video by hitting the like button, commenting or sharing. That video is then likely to be displayed to many thousands more people. That's how a Facebook page with 50,000 followers can reach 250,000 people or more with one post. A chunk of those people will also like the page. Rinse and repeat. And the best part? You can now advertise to each and every one of these followers, every single day of the year and it won't cost a PENNY. Not only can you advertise to each and every one of them, but you can also segment your posts so that they are only seen by people living in certain regions. You can therefore plug every single meeting in advance and only local people will see the post. Social media works. And that's just one Facebook page. You get every club doing this, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and you start giving away free passes, free merchandise, sharing epic clips and generally interacting with the fans and before you know it you have a marketing powerhouse at your fingertips and it's not cost you more than the annual wage of 1 or 2 staff members split between all the clubs. This coffee shop nonsense, although a nice idea, is just another step backwards. It will be another waste of money with little to no return, that will only further convince the dinosaurs in this industry that advertising and marketing doesn't work.

Social media is nothing to do with preaching to the converted. If you spend a little bit of time and money on the right material you can reach 1 million+ people on social media. This isn't guess work, it's based on me being CTO for a company with a £10m+ turnover generated almost entirely from social media. A cafe will do nothing. A sustained and committed social media strategy involving each and every club could save the entire sport.

Because attracting 3, 4, 5 or even 20 people from a local cafe to attend an event that they are unlikely to ever attend again is not a good approach to marketing. It won't grow the sport in the slightest.

The coffee shop is a terrible idea. Waste of money and will achieve nothing.

This is the right answer. Don't piss around with cafes and hastily thrown together shops. Social media is the only way forward.

They are referring to the fact that the Aussies tend to work over here so that they can live here in a country that is more or less like home and still travel easily to European matches.

What? So basically every 8 point rider in the league will be dropped if they don't perform. What a stupid system.

If it's one over 8 and GP riders are being assessed at 8 then it plays right into the hands of the wealthier clubs.

True that!

But wouldn't that have been around the same time that Chris Holder was banned and Matt Ford helped him appeal his ban? Seems a bit strange that Matt would be keen to help a rider who had no intention of riding for him, and strange that Chris would be going to Matt for support?

Unfortunately that's what you get with a team full of Brit's... inconsistency.

As I said on the Somerset thread, a lot of people are saying "Somerset wanted Chris, Chris wanted Somerset, and Matt wouldn't let it happen", but has anybody actually got any proof of this? So far we've seen a single news article saying that Matt and Chris are working on a deal, but have some non financial issues. As far as I'm concerned we're all just guessing at this point?

This whole "Somerset wanted Chris, Chris wanted Somerset" thing has been banded around a lot, as if it were fact, but has anywhere actually confirmed this?

Sure hope so!