Social Media at Colo-Colo

Back in 2012, Colo-Colo, one of the most popular soccer clubs in Chile, had a big problem with social media. They joined Twitter and Facebook late in the game, so their accounts weren’t popular. Besides that, other unofficial accounts had gained followers using the logo and name of the club, with out permission.

One of these unofficial accounts had almost one million followers. They looked like the official page, however they had no problem attacking the club and their owners due to the bad results of the club in the tournament. Colo-Colo had no digital presence in order to respond to those attacks.

My first responsibility when I assumed as Communications Manager, was to recover that lost voice on social media. We developed a strategy to recover the official usernames and with that we started to post content that appealed to the fans’ passion and showcased the success history of the club. Beside that, with a team of journalists, we created strategic content about the good things that the club was doing, but nobody was talking about.

We started to contact the fans, talked with them, shared experiences and looked for ways to improve how the club had related with them before.

We used the players as influencers, and gave awards to the most loyal followers by giving them game tickets or the opportunity to take pictures with a player.

We also had help from Facebook by validating our fan page. With that, the content and the new digital voice, we made a big difference from the none official fan pages.

After three years, we reached two million fans on Facebook, and over 500k on Twitter thus becoming one of the chilean brands with more engagement on social media, positioned over LATAM, Falabella and Coca-Cola.

I had the pleasure to share this experience in webinars and seminars. Here is an interview I participated in on CNN Chile, regarding my experience as a community manager in a sport club.