How to Make the Most Out Of Your Brand’s Content Distribution Strategy

How do brands increase engagement after they’ve maxed out all their own channels? By leveraging the influence of brand advocates.Content is king, but there’s only so much you can post on your brand’s social media without overcrowding your feed and exhausting followers.

According to content distribution platform Socialie’s Commercial Director Chris Sellers, when brands engage with their influencers, they see on average a 13x increase in reach and a 60% increase in content.

To see how this works, we connected with Loulou Rowlands—the Director of Member Services at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP).

How ATP Engages Fans Beyond Their Own Brand Channels

As the global governing body of men’s professional tennis, ATP showcases the greatest tennis players and entertains billions of fans around the world. Every year, they host the ATP Tour: a top-tier tennis tour in which roughly 500 players compete in 64 tournaments in 31 countries across six continents.

While ATP obviously posts to their own channels, it’s the players—their brand advocates—that have the biggest following in the tennis world. ATP Players want to engage with their fans in their own voice as much and as quickly as possible. Loulou’s goal is to help them do this by ensuring they have the quality content they need to connect with their community and sponsors on social media at any time.

ATP’s Real-Time Content Workflow 

It all starts with photo teams capturing images on the ground at various tournaments around the world.

Photographers upload images in real-time from tournaments via FTP to PhotoShelter, where all images from across the tour are stored. These images are tagged with relevant metadata like the player’s names or jersey number, which get added automatically via PhotoShelter AI‘s facial recognition feature, PeopleID.

As soon as the assets are uploaded to a PhotoShelter collection, ATP’s internal team uses them for their own editorial, social media, and website channels.

At the same time, players tagged in an image’s metadata automatically get notifications from their Socialie accounts through the PhotoShelter + Socialie Integration when new images are available, as well as information about the image’s usage rights (e.g., editorial only) and photo credits. The players can then broadcast their images to the world instantly and directly from Socialie.

Results, By the Numbers

Whenever a player posts using Socialie, ATP receives data analytics about the post, which they send to tournament organizers. Loulou walked us through data examples from a past tournament, in which ATP shared nearly 5,000 photos with 159 players.

Around 60% of these players posted the photos to their social media, resulting in close to 12.5 million total impressions.

At first glance, the 5.56% post rate—the number of photos players actually post divided by how many photos ATP sends them—might seem low. However, Loulou explains this is because ATP sends players hundreds of photo options, and a player often ultimately picks one to use.

By harnessing the influence of their players, ATP reaches an exponentially larger audience than it would if they only posted on their brand’s channels—which is just a snapshot of what’s possible for brands everywhere.

To find out how you can amplify your brand’s story and maximize your content’s engagement through brand advocates, learn more about PhotoShelter + Socialie.