‘Relevant, interesting, different’: How the Chicago Bulls are growing their following

This story is the first in a series about how marketers for sports teams and leagues around the world approach social media strategy.

Founded in 1966, the Chicago Bulls are one of the older teams in the NBA. But they’re young at heart—or at least online.

The Bulls have the highest TikTok engagement rate of any team across seven major North American pro leagues so far this year, at 13.87%, according to social media analytics company Rival IQ. The team’s TikTok audience has been growing, VP of content Luka Dukich said, but that’s not the platform on which the Bulls have the largest following: They have 16 million followers on Facebook and more than 10 million on Instagram, compared to 2.5 million on TikTok. So, alright, maybe the team does have a little bit of Gen X energy.

With a “uniquely huge social following” at more than 45 million followers across its social platforms, according to Dukich, the Bulls social media team has learned the importance of differentiating their content in order to stand out in the crowded sports landscape and continue building their fanbase online.

“We just really want to be present in our fans’ lives every day,” Dukich told Marketing Brew. “We want to be relevant. We want to be interesting. We want to be different.”

Inside basketball

The Bulls’ social media strategy is largely about storytelling, Dukich said. He’s been with the team for almost a decade and said that hasn’t always been the case.

“The content game has evolved,” he said. “You have to do stuff that’s not just covering the basketball team. People can go a million different places to get the score of the game last night, or to get the highlights, or to get photos from the game.”

Game coverage, especially exciting moments like buzzer beaters, are still important for teams to post, but off-court content also almost always plays with the Bulls’ followers, Dukich said. The team’s handshake series, a collection of videos of players doing things like fist bumping the content coordinator or completing the hand heart, has more than 101 million views and 16 million likes on TikTok so far, and its 2023–24 schedule release video has almost 2 million views on X alone.

It also helps that not just any brand has the access to players required to create that kind of off-court content. Players even act differently in front of the team’s cameras and content creators these days, in part because they understand the role content can play in elevating the league, team, and their own personal brands, Dukich said.

“Your competitive advantage from a content perspective is that you have access to these players off the court,” he said. “You have a unique viewpoint that people aren’t getting when they watch the game on TV.”

Benny and the Bulls

Players like Zach LaVine and Coby White aren’t the only faces you’ll see on the Bulls’ social media. There’s also Benny the Bull, the team’s red-hot mascot, who has 5.5 million followers on TikTok, more than double the Bulls’ account. TikTok users are as excited about Benny as they are about the actual players, Dukich said. “He is an influencer.”

An Instagram video of a courtside interaction between Benny and Bill Murray from February has almost 20,000 likes, and another video of Benny playing ping pong with Celtics guard Jrue Holiday has almost 500,000 likes.

Benny doesn’t even need the added star power to rack up the views: Over the winter, he visited a Chicago phenomenon dubbed “the rat hole” in a TikTok video with more than a million views, and even earned coverage from local news outlets like ABC7 and CBS News Chicago. A video of him explaining the eclipse in April has more than 3 million views and 50,000 shares, according to the Bulls.

Dukich said his team doesn’t just have one goal for the season across all their social media efforts, though one of their overarching objectives is to “set ourselves apart” from other teams. Instead, they evaluate posts differently based on platform. For instance, the Bulls might get fewer views on an average YouTube video than a typical Instagram Reel, but that doesn’t mean the YouTube content is less successful, Dukich said.

“If you get 20,000 views on a long-form piece of content on YouTube, that seems small, considering every IG Reel you put out is getting hundreds of thousands,” he said. “But those 20,000 views are people who are watching with their whole screen. You have their undivided attention…One’s not necessarily better than the other, but 20,000 on YouTube is 20,000. That’s a stadium full of people that spent minutes watching your content.”