Los Angeles Kings

Situation
At the start of the 2012 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs, SocialSphere began working with the Los Angeles Kings to create more buzz, interest, activity and fan engagement on Twitter — previously identified by our ORBIT Report^® as hockey’s dominant social media platform.

Solution
We used ORBIT™ for Twitter to identify several dozen of the most influential @LAKings hockey fans and developed an A/B messaging platform that was used by the Kings social media team to reach out and engage with fans.  As the playoffs progressed, we tracked activity daily and during gamedays, we tracked it by period – constantly optimizing the strategy and technique for identifying and engaging new groups of influential fans.

Results
Well before the Kings were the hottest hockey team on the planet, after Round One of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, our program and collaboration with the Kings social media team was responsible for:

• A rate of growth in followers on Twitter that was 7x the league average (among the other 15 teams in the playoffs during the same period) and nearly 4x higher than the team with the second highest growth rate, the Flyers;
• Adding 8.8x more followers per day (average of 163 vs. 1,446) during the playoffs compared to the last few weeks of the regular season;
• A 7.9x increase in the number of @LAKings mentions per day on Twitter (787 vs. 6,178).

Compared to every other team in the NHL playoffs, between April 11 and April 28, 2012 our collective efforts resulted in:

• 2.8x more @LAKings followers added (27,443) than the average team (9,868);
• 3.1x increase in total mentions (114,601) compared to the average team (37,162);

– which lead to a Deadspin feature lauding our approach as “a window into the future of social media in sports”

And we were proud to make our mark not only in the NHL but throughout the competitive Los Angeles sports scene as well — as the @LAKings follower base increased by 27,473 followers, or 39 percent, while the Lakers base increased two percent, the Clippers six percent — the Dodgers increased twelve percent and the Angels seven percent.  Despite this overwhelming success on Twitter, the Los Angeles Kings presence, growth and engagement on Facebook were average when compared to the other 15 teams in the NHL playoffs at the time.