For a long time, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) felt it didn’t need a social media strategy. After all, more people attended Wrestlemania XXVI than the Super Bowl, held in the same stadium, and WWE’s website has 610,000 registered users and more than 14 million average monthly unique visitors worldwide.
But a few months ago, WWE noticed that its fans were all over Facebook and Twitter talking about its stars. Plus, there was a problem with people impersonating those superstars on Twitter. So, deciding that if you can’t beat ‘em, you ought to join ‘em, the company jumped in to social media, quietly at first.
Within two months, 500,000 Facebook users had hit the “Like” button to become fans on WWE’s Facebook page and more than 93,000 were following the brand on Twitter.
WWE also set up Twitter accounts for many of its top performers. For example, notes Casey Hibbard in an article on SocialMedia Examiner within two hours of his first tweet, WWE superstar John Cena had amassed 5,000 Twitter followers, with the number growing to 30,000 in his first week.
Now, WWE has more than 50 official and performer accounts and 90 official and star pages on Facebook.
To maintain brand consistency across social networks, WWE created a “W” logo to distinguish Twitter and Facebook from imposters. Though initially under the marketing team at WWE, the digital content division now manages social networks, realizing that it’s largely about online content. The team tweets about 10 to 15 times every day, posting news and links back to videos, photos and other content to encourage fans to come back to the WWE website.
