JB Alliot, Advisor to the UEFA Innovation Hub, recently spoke on Unofficial Partner: The Sports Business Podcast about how UEFA is working with national associations to make the UEFA Euro soccer tournament more exciting, especially for younger audiences. He was joined by Manu Leroy, Director of Marketing and Communications for the Royal Belgian Football Association, and Daniel Kirschner, CEO of Greenfly. They discussed how to best use social media going forward, and how sharing rights-managed photos and video clips with players, sponsors and broadcasters is growing global audiences.
As the UEFA Euro 2021 soccer tournament approaches, JB Alliot shared specifically how the use of Greenfly has allowed UEFA to partner with the national associations, centralize and share access to digital content, and expand UEFA’s digital reach and fan appeal. Since the pandemic, the organization has also been able to use Greenfly to bring fans closer to the action.
“With the pandemic, [fans] have not been able to go to the stadiums. To a certain extent, we’ve leveraged Greenfly to bring fans closer to the action and also allowed fans to share their own content and moments. As a result, we’ve been able to bring it back to the fan zones, different stadiums, and overall create an atmosphere around the stadium,” said Alliot.
Leroy added that Greenfly has provided a central location for players and social media managers to access photos and share on players’ social media accounts — echoing the most powerful use case of the platform.
As Kirschner shared, “Making content available to the players and their social media managers at scale is one of the many powerful things about our technology. As players share content on their personal accounts, it drives tremendous energy and excitement around the club. Because social media algorithms prioritize individual accounts, you are able to get much more reach and engagement from players’ accounts versus your owned account.”
Listen to the full podcast episode to hear more about players as brands, all the noise that comes from having many publishing entities, and the importance of understanding your audience and social channels.
