AS Roma show how Football Clubs can use LinkedIn
Italian giant AS Roma are one of the best football clubs in Social Media – in recent months they’ve shown they want to be early adopters to new Social Networks and try to be as creative as possible in how they engage with their fans. If in doubt, take a look at how they became the first football club to use Pinterest, or their innovative use of iTunes playlists.
The latest step they’ve taken is to harness LinkedIn as a way of targeting fans who perhaps have more business/professional orientated careers. Earlier this week, AS Roma announced on their official club website that they would be launching a new AS Roma Company Page on LinkedIn and had developed a specific strategy for the channel.
Last year, we urged football clubs to adopt LinkedIn as an official Social Media channel – at the time we stated:
“By using a shared interest in football, it creates a casual and comfortable first point of contact in which relationships are already created. We all know that businesses exploit this bond between fans, if in doubt, just look at the number of corporate hospitality tickets on sale every season. The fans do use the channels, and they clearly want to connect with other supporters, despite the more formal nature of LinkedIn”
It certainly looks like AS Roma have thought similar and are perhaps using LinkedIn as a way to market their more corporate products – for instance, premium seats, corporate hospitality packages and even attracting new sponsors.
LinkedIn is the 4th most popular social network in Italy with nearly 4 million active users – so it’s a good fit for the Rome side to try network with potential sponsors. A quick look through their new official channel shows that Roma have very cleverly already began to target businesses and fans – with most of their content being around new sponsorship ventures, executive season ticket offers and which major brands they already work with.
As football clubs look set to monetize Social Media in 2013, don’t be surprised if more clubs follow in a bid to try market their corporate hospitality and sponsorship packages to a more affluent audience.
