It’s not as if there is a lack of buzz around Lebron James on the web, specifically on Twitter. Just a few days ago, we talked about how Lebron James was trending. This is because Lebron, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, and a few other players are free agents and everyone wants to know where they will end up. To capitalize on this, the NBA purchased Lebron’s name as a Sponsored Trend.
At first, many people thought Lebron himself was the reason behind his name showing up as a sponsored trend on the Twitter home page. The reality is that the NBA is trying to leverage his current popularity and buzz around his name to drive traffic to their own website. Clicking on Lebron’s name shows related organic tweets as well as a promoted tweet from the NBA itself that says “For all your LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and other NBA Free Agency updates check out Decision 2010 on NBA.com http://bit.ly/924XL9.”
The link in the above tweet simply points to NBA.com, where they are doing a lot of coverage on free agents, the off-season, and their Decision 2010 page. This is a site dedicated to NBA Free Agency and provides all the latest news on who is meeting with who and what these free agents are doing. You can also access trackers for specific players you might be interested in, including Lebron, to see exactly what is going on with them.
This is a pretty slick move by the NBA. Popular sports figures are routinely used to market the sporting organizations, putting a face to the sport itself, but the NBA is taking this to a different level by doing so in the social media realm. They have grabbed a Promoted Trend based on Lebron’s popularity in the trending topics. This means that his name will show up at the bottom of the Trending Topics list even if other topics become more popular.
In addition, they have a Promoted Tweet in place that will show up once users click the Promoted Trend. This tweet shows up at the top of the search results related to Lebron, driving visitors to the NBA website. Since the NBA put this promoted trend in place, Lebron has gone from being mentioned about 500 times per hour on Twitter to 3,000 and rising.