How athletes can earn money from social media

Social media is no longer just a thing of time pass, relaxation, and chill, but it has now become an imperative tool for the growth of any business. Having a good digital presence has become one of the building blocks of any business or even your career. The wise people say ‘never underestimate the power of social media‘. Just like any corporate company, an individual through his or her digital presence can do some awesome things to make huge and rapid career progress. Athletes also need social media and digital media presence to keep in touch with their fans. Athletes nowadays use social media to make a side income along with the income by playing sports. In this blog we will look at how athletes can earn money from social media.

How athletes can earn money from social media

Build a Long-Term Following

The first and foremost thing for anyone to be active on social media is by getting followers and following the people. The importance of getting followers and maintaining a good relationship with them becomes far more important for an athlete as compared to any normal individual. This is because athletes are celebrities, they are public figures. So fans want to know what a player does in his day-to-day life other than sports.

The more they get to know them, the more personal and connected the audience feel. If you compare the athletes who are active on social media to those who are inactive, the popularity level of the first case outperforms that of the other. It’s quite simple, isn’t it? When a player posts the photos regularly, fans see the photos regularly, obviously people talk about that athlete more frequently as compared to those who are inactive. A sportsperson can have Instagram Live, Facebook Live, interviews with fans, behind the scene stories, and whatnot. Social media is full of creativity, you just need to search a bit.

Thus fan support gets stronger and the more merchandise, tickets, and products you can sell to them easily.

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Gain More Sponsorships

As far as athletes are concerned sponsorship is has multiple benefits for them. Firstly, you need not invest any amount to get the sponsorship deal, and secondly, even if the sponsor could not get the desired results from the deal, you are officially not responsible for it. The bottom line is, to stay away from controversy and reap rewards by doing small things like photo shoots or acting in an advertisement.

When it comes to social media, companies are willing to give millions for a single sponsored post on the digital platform. A sportsperson is a celebrity and when he or she promotes a certain product, the sponsor gets the result that they want. 

The only thing the athlete needs to be careful of is his or her image in the public. Sponsors only approach a player who has a clean image, a good reputation, respect among the people, who is trustworthy, honest, and faithful.

Improve Game Attendance

Sportspersons, though they earn millions, thrive on the people watching and attending the game. If people are not willing to watch the match, then stakeholders like boards, sponsors, organizers, clubs, owners, and stadiums will be too hesitant to continue the activity. This collapses the financial structure of the stakeholders and the stakeholders’ revenue will decrease and so will the salary of an athlete. Hence improving game attendance is critical.

Hence to improve game attendance, an athlete should maintain the quality and level of performance. Other considerations like sending out emails, updating schedules, and making sure social media channels show when major events are going to happen so that more people will stay in the loop. And when more people know about events in advance, they’ll be able to get tickets, time off from work, and make the time to show up.

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Create a Brand That Grows with You

Here we are not talking about any tangible things. We are talking about intangible things like the player’s image, the player’s brand, etc. To simplify things, the name ‘ Virat Kohli ‘ is no more just a name of a cricket player, it has its brand value and it grows or falls depending on the on-field performance and off-field behavior. So the success of an athlete’s brand depends on his personality and reputation.

So keeping a safe distance from controversies, disputes, and legal issues and creating a positive aura about themselves, an athlete can create a brand that grows with them. To reach this feat, smaller things like social media engagement with fans, respecting fans’ opinions, giving them insights into your life, using a social media trend, sponsorships, paid posts, social work, charity, and other such things can help your brand to grow with you.

Hire a PR agent

Hiring a PR agent is one of the expensive tasks, especially for the athlete who is still struggling to make it to the top. Nonetheless, it is extremely essential. As a sportsperson, most of your time will be spent on training, gym, practice, skill development, meetings, analysis, and lots of traveling. As a result, you just cannot be active on social media after all the hectic work. You need to relax, ultimately your skills on the field matter most to you.

In such a case, PR agents are the way to go. They will keep handling your social media handles, will help you to get sponsorship and endorsement deals, will create positivity about you and your brand name, and will suppress the negativity. The PR agent can also handle the things like a press conference, press release, etc. Hence hiring a PR agent will not only save your time but will also help you to give 100% focus on your performance and the rest will be taken care of by the PR agent.

Publish consistently

Just like a player’s on-field consistency, consistency on social media is very important. An athlete can earn a huge amount of money by being a part of social media consistently. So do share your gym sessions, practice sessions, meals, and food supplements with the audience regularly. This will generate a tremendous amount of views which will take your reputation to another level.

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Collaborate with other influential channels

Collaborating with other social media handles will help both parties. Both the parties will have their fan base and when you collaborate, the views and overall engagement will experience a surge like never before.

Attract attention, but deliver value

Eventually, the quality of content matters to the viewers. So while attracting attention, take care of the content value. Even a slight decline in quality can affect you adversely. The negativity spreads quickly, hence always take care of it more than anything else.

Conclusion

Social media, as said earlier, is a fantastic way to make your brand and popularity grow in leaps and bounds. The bottom line is to stay away from every controversy. As discussed earlier, the negativity spreads far more quickly and it takes a tremendous amount of effort to build a reputation after its downfall. Thus by simply posting positive things and with some tricks mentioned above, the athlete can earn huge amounts of money with the use of social media.

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