How Nike is using Social Media to its competitive advantage

Sportswear giants Nike proudly wear the crown when it comes to social media marketing, with the last five years seeing Nike expanding its efforts to connect with a huge audience on a global scale.

  With sports inherently a social activity, it makes sense that Nike take to social media naturally and they  have realised this. Having moved away from more traditional forms of marketing, investing greatly into social media, in particular Twitter, Facebook and their own social platform Nike+.

Facebook

Nike uses separate Facebook pages for each of its categories, with each page updated with content on a daily basis. Along with its main corporate account, Nike have amassed a huge Facebook following. Posting content on latest releases, including video footage and images, as well as sportsman endorsement from some of the biggest names around the planet. Nike also successfully run campaigns and competition through their Facebook page, which once again allows for interaction as videos and images go viral, such as the #makeitcount campaign which used the following video;

Twitter

Once again Nike uses different twitter feeds for its separate categories and for each category the focus is around mentions rather than promoting marketing campaigns or new products. Nike responds and interacts to over 100 of their followers every day regarding sales and stock enquiries. This focus on responding to mentions is consistent throughout each of their categories as they use twitter to offer advice to users. 

 Of course twitter is also a great platform to promote campaigns and once again Nike do this well. For the London olympics in 2012, Nike used an ambush campaign against rivals adidas called #findyourgreatness. With adidas sealing the role of official sponsor, Nike had to be careful not to feature anything Olympics related, however coinciding with the start of the games released a TV advert featuring every day athletes and supported this with a twitter campaign using the hashtag #findyourgreatness. The campaign was a huge success as it connected with their audience on an emotional level and differentiated itself from the competition. 

Nike+

With other brands having tried and failed in their attempts to create a social network for their customers, Nike successfully launched Nike+ back in 2009, which provided runners with their very own social media platform.  Nike have created a value offering with the Nike+ site enabling users to track their running history and health stats. Despite certain hiccups at the start, the site has developed over the years, working out the bugs to make the platform far more easy to navigate and more interactive for its user.

For more information into Nike's social media tactics be sure to visit: https://econsultancy.com/blog/62412-how-nike-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-and-google#i.chuc3d18vmfdmy