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Why Every Athlete Needs To MASTER Instagram
By Adam Juratovac
Twitter: @JvacAttack
Instagram: @JvacAttack
If you’re a professional athlete you must use Instagram and you must get good at it. Being on the edge of the rising social media accounts is important because there is value in an audience and your position as an athlete puts you in a spotlight. This position grants you the option to build your athlete brand via social media and use your athlete status to influence a potentially large group of people. You need to reach these people and a great way to do so is through social media. The landscape of social media has evolved to much more than Facebook and Twitter so with the advent of each new social media comes opportunities to connect with a new audience, learn what a new group of people like, and to fuel your other social media accounts.
Instagram is not a new social media player, it is an established social network that boasts more than 300 million active users, most of them under the age of 35. The number of users is growing and the amount of young users are increasing which means that more and more people are connecting and will continue to connect with Instagram. It’s the Facebook of their time. This audience enjoys sports, are visually driven, and will follow members of their favorite sports team. Because Instagram is visually driven and instagram is flooded with pictures of food and selfies, contrasting pictures of sporting events, uniforms, and feats of athleticism stand out. This gives you a greater opportunity to drive people to your account because your content is different. Once the audience is led to your account they will be more apt to follow you because you give them a personal look of what the athlete lifestyle is like. You’re interesting.
Through Instagram, you will also be know and understand what your audience likes. Instagram has much higher engagement rates than Twitter and Facebook. An engagement on Instagram constitutes as a “like” or a “comment” which is much more common on Instagram as opposed to Facebook or Twitter. This allows athletes to see what kind of content their followers like, what content their followers comment on, which leads to you being able to build your brand more effectively based on their likes. You get instant feedback on your fans, friends, and family and what their likes and dislikes are but more importantly you get to see how much those people support you.
Just because a follower is on Instagram doesn’t mean that they’re not on other social media channels. There is overlap within the social media world because people like engaging and finding new ways to connect with their friends. Because of this, there are a lot of users with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media accounts. It’s normal. This is an opportunity for athletes to brand themselves on each social media account but also to drive more followers to their other social media accounts through Instagram. It can be as easy as an Instagram post that says “hey, follow me on Twitter, @JvacAttack, for exclusive content.” This overlap can lead to more followers who are genuine and appreciate your brand. These are the types of users that will retweet, repost, share, comment, and be behind you. These are the fans that you want. Instagram allows you to connect with these people visually and more personally (more than 160 characters) with a glimpse of your lifestyle that will intrigue them about your professional life (LinkedIn), thoughts (Twitter), and moments (Snapchat).
Instagram is a solid and established form of social media that is growing within the younger age group and leads to higher engagement than other social medias avenues. Because of this, it’s the perfect place to build your athlete brand, connect with a new and maturing user base, along with showing them what you ate for lunch. If you’re an athlete, you need to get Instagram and put some energy into it.