Premier Lacrosse League Scores With Social in Inaugural Season

The Premier Lacrosse League tapped into its athlete roster to engage fans, seeing its social-first vision come to life — and extending that collaboration to partners, too.

Building a sports league today takes grit and a competitive spirit. If you’re the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL), you know it also takes social media, technology and a mobilized athlete community equipped with photo and video content. With Greenfly and Photoshelter, the PLL sees its social-first vision come to life. 

Through the Greenfly Connect tool, the league fully automates last-mile social workflows for the visual content its photographers and staff capture and upload to Photoshelter throughout the season. The PLL instantly connects that content with its community of over 160 athletes via the Greenfly mobile app, making it easy for them to share game photos and videos to fans as soon as they step off the field. In minutes, they’ve expanded their brands and the PLL brand as well. The league saw a 15% growth in social following for PLL athletes in the first two weeks of use.

Premiew Lacrosse League

Gained a +300% lift in player social interactions

The PLL has built upon that initial success with athlete social content distribution to also enable its athletes to create social content in collaboration with brand partners. The PLL recognizes that its players are brand ambassadors, whose personal success is intertwined with the league’s. Athletes, league staff and corporate partners all share a private group communication and content exchange channel. The league and the club proactively provide each athlete with access to galleries of game clips and practice photos, so they have great content for their personal social media feeds. League partners also have access to galleries of photos and videos from PLL games, practices and content showcasing their products. The result: Players and partners delivering more of what their fans want—high-quality content in their feeds.

PLL sponsor Gorilla Glass from Corning experiences the benefits of social media authenticity in their partnership activation with the PLL. The brand gave the league and players guidance on what they wanted the content to accomplish and then let the players do their thing, their way. When the brand asked players to post photos of themselves using Gorilla Glass products to social media, they had the players use Greenfly to submit those photos back to the brand’s marketing team, too. Gorilla Glass was not only getting value from player social media posts, they received authentic content for their own brand channels, as well. 

Athlete social content collaboration is a win-win-win between the league, players and partners.

See how your organization can rewrite the marketing playbook with your athletes.