The Biggest Sports Reporters Driving Engagement on Social Media

Fostering connections between journalists and audiences is increasingly vital on social. We dive into the top reporters of popular sports sites in our latest analysis.

As the media part of social media becomes ever important, so does the role of the reporter. Journalists can form a rapport with readers on their own Facebook Pages or Twitter handles. This also helps bypass the algorithm as fans of an author may choose to follow the person, so that content has less of a likelihood of getting lost in the news feed.

Plus, a well-known, reputable reporter can assuage readers’ fears about reading fake news.
Sports in general can elicit strong feelings toward particular reporters. Passionate sports fans turn to their experts to get the theories and analyses of their favorite teams and players.

So which reporters see the biggest engagements with readers on social? NewsWhip Analytics allows us to dig into that, choosing any category that we’re interested in, across any domain that we want to analyze. Let’s take a look. 

Top Sports Reporters

For this analysis, we looked at the month of December 2016. We examined the authors driving the biggest engagements on ten of the top sports sites on social, and singled out the top for each publication.

These were the top authors for each of these publications. Two notes – ESPN has a tendency to tag its articles as being written by staff, so Mohammed Isam was the highest engaging individual reporter for the sports site. For USA Today, we looked solely at their sports content to determine Facebook engagements and top authors.

Out of these authors, Patrik Walker saw the most Facebook engagements on his articles published to 24/7 Sports. On this list, he also was responsible for the biggest percentage of his publication’s total Facebook engagements for December 2016. Nearly 30 percent of 24/7 Sports’ engagements came from Patrik Walker’s content.

Nikhil Anand, of the popular cricket publisher, Cric Tracker, drove over a quarter of the site’s Facebook engagements last month. And Kelsey Hendrix drove a fifth of total Facebook engagements for Sports Illustrated.

Output of Top Content

How successful were these authors in regards to the publishers’ top content for the month? Were they simply producing a huge number of articles that drummed up the engagements, or did their stories hit it big for their publishers last month? 
For this, we looked in Analytics at each of the publishers’ most engaging articles in December 2016. We analyzed how many articles of each publishers’ top 100 were written by their most engaging author.

Patrik Walker, our highest engaging reporter, also penned the biggest percentage of their publisher’s top 100 articles. Over two-thirds, 67 of 24/7 Sports’ top 100 articles, came from Patrik Walker.

Damon Martin of Fox Sports contributed a third of the site’s top sports articles on Facebook last month, followed by Kelsey Hendrix with 28 percent for Sports Illustrated. Mohammed Isam of ESPN had the fewest, with only two articles in ESPN’s top 100 of December 2016.

The Winning Content

We can look again, at Analytics, to see if there are any correlating trends from these top authors. If we were doing more intricate research, we might examine each authors’ highest engaging stories, to look at the substance, length, headlines, and more that are driving their success.
For now, let’s see if there are any patterns between the top authors for these ten publications.

Of course, what works can be contingent on the specific publication and its readership. Even so, we can get an idea of the type of content that is successful for each site.

There are game recaps here, along with announcements about players and teams. But, some of the top content doesn’t have to do with the games and matches themselves, instead having to do with players’ behavior outside of the game, or pop culture tie-ins, like Conor McGregor being cast in Game of Thrones.

Digging into a top engaging author’s best performing content can reveal some successful content trends. Going beyond the story to the native social media posts spurring the engagement, can also reveal how readers are interacting with that content and the author him or herself.

It’s clear that social media networks are focusing more on fostering communities and connections between reporter and reader. With Facebook’s latest initiative, journalists can now stream Live video through their publication’s page. We’ve looked at the opportunities Live video presents for sports authors before.

As more and more social media innovations help reporters connect to their fans, it’ll be essential to know what stories and tactics will be the most successful. 

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