Social media is a positive or a negative, depending on who you ask.
Those that see it in a positive light will point out that you can reach a much broader audience using social media. Between the various platforms, you can reach them using written, audio, or video content and keep them engaged with a brand however you want to. It’s given athletes platforms to raise their own profile, bring attention to causes they care about, and new ways to monetize their image, likeness, and popularity.
A sport the NHL and its athletes could absolutely learn a lot from in using social media is F1. The amount of fresh content that is put out by teams and their drivers is generally pretty good, with new videos or games filmed with the drivers each week as well as well-packaged highlight reels and recaps of each race weekend.
Granted, that is easier to do when it’s a race a week or every two weeks during the season. Much harder to do that when you’re in an 82-game regular season game where you’re playing 3-4 games in a week’s span. The grind for anyone around the team becomes overwhelming and it leaves little energy left to do something new on top of the day-to-day, especially with the significantly smaller staffs many teams have in this department.
Even recognizing the limitations of the NHL today and how it values the role of social media in those caveats, the thing that is noticeably different between F1 and the NHL seems to be the willingness or acceptance of what the various content platforms do to raise the profile of its athletes and, by extension, the sport. Both the NHL and F1 have athletes that range across the age spectrum that are from all over the world and speak different languages. But something that F1 has unlocked somewhere along the way is the acceptance of individualism within the team environment while the NHL typically pushes back against making a name for yourself above the crest on the chest.
And that’s a critical miscalculation in the modern age, in my opinion.
More and more, research is showing that the way that people consume sports is through the connection to the individuals and less so the connection to the team as a brand. It shows in the people that hop teams between seasons because of their favorite player being traded or signed there, or the larger followings the elite athletes have when compared to the teams they play on (for example, Connor McDavid has around 1.1 million followers on Instagram while the Edmonton Oilers have around 814k.) This is especially true amongst the younger fans that grew up with social media at their fingertips from a young age. They’re used to connecting to their peers through social media throughout all phases of their life.
No NHL athlete embraces that brand identity on their social media the way F1 drivers do. How I even became interested in F1 recently was because I saw a video of a driver, Lando Norris, doing the thing I’ve always hoped to see in real life: shutting down a misogynistic journalist when he interjected to dismiss a compliment Norris had given to a female journalist asking a question. Truly, a king moment. So, naturally, I wanted to learn more about this athlete and I checked out their social channels and the rabbit hole continued from there.
In consuming this content, I realized that I have never seen the NHL market the way F1 does using social media. (Though Tyler Seguin on the whole might be one of the NHL players that employs a social media strategy closer to what I’ve seen from F1 drivers.) If the NHL hopes to grow its game, it needs to work on gatekeeping and the culture needs to shift to embrace individualism. Fans, teams, and media need to encourage players that desire to embrace a strategy of growing a name for themselves as a brand and showing their personalities in new ways that aren’t what you’re used to seeing to date.
Evolve or die.
This isn’t to downplay the brand’s role in growing the game. It’s still critical to have content from the team side, as they have the access and ability to capture those moments of the athletes fans love and put it out into the world. But there is a strategic line that needs to be utilized for growing the sport through the brand that can be defined differently for athletes themselves on their own social platforms.
And that line has to do with viral trends and showcasing athletes in a way that doesn’t invite an elevated level of toxicity that can also come along with social media.
The negatives of social media can sometimes outweigh the positives. While access and interaction between the general public and an athlete has never been more than it is today because of social media, it can also be toxic. Berating, unacceptable use of language, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, sexual harassment, and even threats of physical violence are pervasive. People feel emboldened to say things that they likely never would hiding behind the anonymity of a social media account than they would if they were face-to-face with a person in real life. It’s really no wonder NHL players wouldn’t want to open themselves up to this environment more than they need to.
The key for brands, who absolutely have to engage in social media as a marketing tool, is not to encourage content that will foster an environment where those negatives are magnified.
The NHL recently learned that the hard way with the Seattle Kraken and the booktok controversy. The TL;DR version is that a player’s wife came out on social media with a statement about how a content creator on TikTok was taking things a little too far when describing her NHL player husband. The official team account, in trying to connect with a new pathway to NHL fandom, leaned maybe a little too far into the booktok content themselves, putting up some videos of players doing stretches or walking into arenas in their gameday attire and setting it to sounds associated with hockey-inspired romance novel content on TikTok that sexualized their own players consistently throughout the season. So, in some ways, they encouraged the behavior by posting similar things themselves.
It’s a fine line, and I do not envy anyone trying to find it without it blowing up in their face at least once. Social media strategy is unbelievably time consuming and a full-time job, not just something you do as a throwaway in your marketing plan. I mean, just look at the sheer number of platforms out there today – Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (it will always be this, come at me), Threads, Blue Sky, the list goes on and on. Staying up-to-date on what content is best suited for what platform is time consuming, and then you have to design a content schedule that actually satisfies each of those consistently enough to grow your following on each. Then, there’s the work of actually creating all that content.
Talk about time consuming.
Social media has also created a fishbowl environment for athletes in that at any given time what they say or do could be overheard by someone or caught on camera and released to the public. To me, this is where the media in all of sports has to do a better job. The line between on the record and off the record gets blurred because of the ability of anyone to fire off a social media post from the phone in their hand. Not everything is meant for public consumption. Establishing a clear boundary so that everyone can be comfortable to have the more off-the-cuff interactions that are key to building rapport and trust between the storyteller and the subject of the story is crucial.
But the true key to the NHL shifting its culture of social media usage is going to be the fans themselves.
Say you are out getting post-game beers after your favorite team got smashed 7-2 and you see some of the players out too. You take to social media to snap sneaky photos or post about how they don’t take the game seriously. Consider: have you not ever gone to a happy hour after a terrible day at the office? Do people say you don’t care about your work? Would you want someone to hold you to a 24-hour-a-day commitment to your job with a clear no-fun-zone established? No, and it’s completely unreasonable to expect of anyone, even if it’s “just a game” to you. Because to athletes in any sport, it’s their career. (It just happens to be a really, really cool one.)
The only way NHL players are going to feel comfortable enough to break out of the conformity and explore new ways to market the sport and themselves (like a F1 driver, for example) is if the fans help create an environment for them to do so. So if you don’t want to see the same basic content from every team and every player, it’s up to you to show that brands and athletes can take that step into a new age of social media engagement.