My colleague and I first noticed the pattern a year and a half ago. Every day, almost without fail, an article from WWE, with its sweat-soaked professional wrestlers in various poses, would hit the trending chart created from our BuzzSumo data.
To appear on the trending content chart, the content must have been shared very quickly. It’s prime real estate for viral content.
Neither of us is a professional wrestling fan, so we noted the phenomenon and moved on. But, WWE.com content continued to trend, and I decided to dig into the share data for sports and entertainment content.
I discovered that WWE is the legit boss of the sports entertainment content marketing arena, no matter who is in the ring. WWE.com has:
- More average and median shares than the NFL, MLB, UFC, and other sports leagues
- More pins on Pinterest than the NFL
- More average shares than sports broadcast network ESPN.com
- More average shares than content about Game of Thrones
As famed wrestler (and Hefty trash bag spokesman) John Cena might say, WWE content marketing has earned respect.
To determine the tactic types contributing to the WWE’s success, I analyzed 482,000 sports and entertainment headlines, and compared the top sports league sites to WWE. (As WWE is a scripted sport, it made sense to evaluate both the sports and entertainment industries. WWE’s corporate site identifies it as an “integrated media organization,” while its Facebook page refers to it as a “sports league.”
Key differentiators WWE uses to encourage phenomenal audience engagement include:
- Social share button placement
- Masterful storytelling
- Female characters
- Importance of images
- Emotional attachment with fans
- Less-is-more content strategy
- Content length that works best for WWE
- Headline words and phrases that drive shares for WWE
Let’s go deeper into the research.
WWE dominates shares
WWE’s content has more shares than huge sports leagues with significant fan bases, more shares than content about HBO powerhouse Game of Thrones, and more shares than ESPN.com, which houses content that appeals to fans of a variety of sports.
During 2016, WWE dominated NFL.com and MLB.com in both average and median shares per post:
In 2017, WWE not only dominated the NFL and MLB, but UFC and ESPN as well.
Compared to a purely entertainment segment, WWE also performed incredibly well. During 2016, WWE’s average and median shares were 6,447 and 68 respectively – 17 times and 11 times greater than content about Game of Thrones, which had an average of 380 shares and a median of six.
WWE commands Pinterest
One thing that intrigued me was the level of engagement with WWE content on Pinterest.
During 2016, WWE.com racked up 57,749 pins, an average of 3.4 per article; NFL.com had 4,604 total pins. The average number of pins for content about Game of Thrones in 2016 was 2.88, and during the first six months of 2017, ESPN.com had an average of 0.18 pins per article.
I asked Alisa Meredith, content marketing manager for Tailwind and a Pinterest marketing specialist, to compare the Pinterest presence of both WWE and the NFL.
The NFL feed is dominated by product photos, Alisa points out. But when you look at the NFL content that fans have pinned, the top pins are game recap videos and an article about New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bündchen.
So, there’s a disconnect between what people are pinning from NFL and what the NFL shares. Pinners are interested in human-interest stories, news, and the individuals involved in the game. But that isn’t what the NFL pins on its boards.
In what could be described as the missed Pinterest opportunity of the century, the NFL has the rights to use the term “Super Bowl,” but it doesn’t have Pinterest boards for things like Super Bowl party planning, decor, snacks, desserts, drinks, etc., a natural fit for the Pinterest audience. This deficit is a huge missed opportunity for traffic from Pinterest, and from Google, which indexes pins and boards, Alisa says.
The top WWE pins were for women wrestlers in bikinis, but those pics don’t fully account for the shares of content from wwe.com. Instead, Alisa says, a lot of boards are created by women and named for WWE characters, both male and female.
“It appears the emotional attachment to the sport and its athletes is strong,” Alisa concludes.
I would argue that the WWE actively courts emotional attachment, giving their fans articles that not only describe what happened in a wrestling matchup, but also how the wrestlers felt about it, what motivated them, and how they reacted to the situation.
Transparency is a powerful tool for connection, not only on Pinterest but across the web as well.
The top shares to Pinterest from WWE almost invariably include the word “photo” in the title, which is not the case with the content most shared to Facebook. “People on Pinterest are absolutely in the mood for browsing…
