This story is the ninth in a series about how marketers for sports teams and leagues around the world approach social media strategy.
The Brooklyn Nets may be one of the only 10 NBA teams to have never won a championship, but they are still No. 1—on TikTok, that is.
With more than 132 million likes on their content, the Nets far outstrip every other team in the league by that metric, according to Marketing Brew’s own review; the Golden State Warriors, the team with the second-most likes in the league, have just over 84 million. And while the Warriors are the most-followed team in the league on TikTok, with 6.2 million followers, the Nets are still in the top five, just ahead of the Chicago Bulls, with 2.8 million followers.
The Nets’ social media following, which includes another 4.7 million on Instagram, wasn’t just built through hopping on viral trends, according to VP of Content Charlie Widdoes, even though the team isn’t opposed to a meme or two. (They really, really, really seem to like the “chill guy” format, for instance.)
Instead, the Nets content team is focused more on connecting with fans through its players, using them not only in posts, but also as a target audience and the inspiration behind the team’s social tone, Widdoes said.
“It’s always evolving, but we lean into our coach, our players, how they speak, our broadcasters,” he told Marketing Brew. “It’s not about us, or the people behind the keys. It’s about amplifying the voices of our organization.”
Brooklyn go hard
Sports teams commonly try to match the tone of voice of their hometown in social content, and for New York teams like the Nets, that can be complicated—so complicated, in fact, that the Nets have a document dedicated to the team’s social voice that’s about 30 pages long, plus one-sheeters dedicated to each player, Widdoes said.
“Ultimately, we want to be authentic to our players, our borough, and that’s a lot harder here,” he told us. “What is authentic in Brooklyn? There’s a million different people, a million different subcultures.”
To help create that authentic tone, Widdoes said his team looks to the Nets players, coaches, and broadcasters for inspiration, and even treats the players as their own target audience for content. The team’s other target audiences are diehard Nets fans, Brooklynites, and basketball fans more generally, he added.
The kinds of posts that most resonate differ platform to platform, Widdoes said: A video of Nets players taking the bro test, a TikTok trend that determines someone’s “bro” status, is the team’s best-performing post on TikTok, while a video poll of players’ favorite Taylor Swift songs is the most popular post on Instagram. On YouTube Shorts, the heart challenge, where players complete the heart-hand symbol with the social media manager, was a top-performing post, while their 2023 schedule release video featuring people misidentifying teams based on their logos, did the best on X.
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On other platforms, simple is best: a clip of Kyrie Irving dunking topped the list of best-performing Facebook posts.
Docs and dunks
Recently, the Nets have turned to YouTube to tell long-form stories about players. The team’s best-performing YouTube video so far is from its behind-the-scenes series The Bridge, and “player storytelling and personality content” is the team’s best-performing content category, seeing more than three times the engagement of the average post for the 2023–24 season, according to the Nets.
One behind-the-scenes series, From ____ to Brooklyn, which focuses on the journeys of individual players, has been fruitful on the platform and off, Widdoes said. Qatar Airways is the presenting sponsor of the series, now in its third season, and the team screened a recent episode about shooting guard Cam Thomas at Cobble Hill Cinemas in Brooklyn, with jersey-patch sponsor GetYourGuide responsible for selling the tickets.
From ____ to Brooklyn has been well-received by both fans and players who appreciate that “our organization is telling our story,” Widdoes said. As of mid-November, the series had almost 500,000 views, with viewership trending up each season, according to the team. Season 3 had 415,000 views by the first week of December, more than Seasons 1 and 2 combined.
While sponsor interest and strong engagement are positive signs, Widdoes said one of his proudest moments was during a screening of the Thomas episode of From ____ to Brooklyn, when he watched Thomas and the rest of the audience react.
“The guy is not the most social guy, he would tell you, but he was beaming,” Widdoes said. “There were, I think, 75 to 100 local high school and middle school basketball players who were there. They were so excited to be there. They sat quietly and watched a 45-minute movie, which I don’t think is common for people of that age these days. I didn’t see cell phones out. I mean, they were really locked in.”
