The company Heaven and I chose to critique is Bleacher Report. Bleacher Report is a sports news and entertainment website that covers all major sports but mainly posts NBA and NFL related content. We chose to do critique Bleacher Report because we found it to be an interesting company to research as we are both familiar with the website and follow their content.
The website launched in 2007 and was bought by the Turner Broadcasting System in 2012. While BR posts a lot of basketball and football content, they also post content about other sports and leagues including, but not limited to, WNBA, MLB, NHL and MMA. They also cover college sports as well, but again mainly focusing on the basketball and football teams. Aside from covering sports news, they’ve launched two animated web series, Game of Zones and Gridiron Heights that pokes fun at NBA and NFL players.
Bleacher Report has a huge online presence on all of the popular social media platforms. On Twitter, they have over 9 million followers, 15.3 million on Instagram, and 9.5 followers on Facebook. Bleacher Report even has a bigger following since they have many accounts dedicated to different sports and leagues. Those accounts focus on soccer, basketball, football and baseball related content. Besides sports related accounts, they have accounts solely for sports gambling, gaming, and even a “sneakerhead” account. Bleacher Report mainly uses social media to post their content as it is where most of its followers get their sports news. It can somewhat be seen as a mix between ESPN and Barstool Sports.
Bleacher Report’s online presence has the ability to keep up with real-time fan interest across all forms of social media. Since its founding in 2007, Bleacher Report has switched from just a sports news website to relying on social media to share their content. As a result, their social media accounts don’t promote their website. The social media platforms we’ll focus on are Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, and the demographic we’re choosing is 18-34 males. As stated in the introduction, Bleacher Report has 15.3 million followers, 9.6 million followers on Twitter, and on TikTok they have 2.3 million followers.
B/R Instagram
Bleacher Report’s Instagram has the most followers among the three social media platforms, so it is clearly the most popular. Their Instagram is mainly highlights of major sports games, some posts will have an infographic about what someone has said/posted, or a sports related breaking news story. They’re big on posting user submitted videos on their account, and often rely on them for content. BR does a great job utilizing the IG story feature, sharing posts from their other accounts, promoting new episodes of their web series, sports highlights etc. BR’s posts are also easily shareable and a lot of their followers usually post them on their own IG stories. Based on how BR uses Instagram, it seems as though they mainly rely on it to share and promote their content and posts, rather than their website. For the most part, BR’s Instagram caters to the 18-34 demographic, which are millennials, and even Gen Z’ers because of the type of content they share and the way they write their posts. While we focused on the male 18-34 millennial demographic, BR appeals to millennial and gen z females.
B/R Twitter
BR’s Twitter is essentially the same as their Instagram meaning they share the same pictures and videos. Bleacher Report will occasionally retweet as well, usually from their other accounts, but also tweets by sports teams or athletes. BR uses the “tweet video” option to tweet out videos by other people and add more context to it so their followers can retweet it. They also tweet out gifs and memes that can relate to millennials. There’s really not much of a difference between their Instagram and Twitter regarding the content they publish since it’s essentially the same posts. Just like Instagram, they rely on it to post and promote their content and the content from their other accounts.
B/R TikTok
Bleacher Report’s TikTok is a bit different from their Twitter and Instagram in that they only post highlights, funny sports related videos, or user submitted videos. There’s virtually no sports news posted on their account. It’s probably because TikTok is a “Gen Z” app, so BR’s account targets that demographic. This is not to say that it doesn’t appeal to millennials, because it certainly does, but for the most part, BR’s TikTok is directed towards Gen Z’ers. Their posts usually have an accompanying sound that’s trending, related hashtags and some sort of variation of the “for you” hashtag in the caption, so the algorithm can put it on users’ feed. The overall purpose of Bleacher Report’s TikTok is for entertainment and to share videos that are related to sports or user submitted.
Now, the assignment was to offer a critique of Bleacher Report, and one of the components included an “areas for improvement” section. Quite honestly, we can’t find a single area of improvement for the company, whatsoever; this isn’t a copout or anything as they’ve just been that good when it comes to literally everything. We thought one area of improvement would be that Bleacher Report could expand their women’s coverage. That was before we realized Bleacher Report had already done that. They acquired the brand “House of Highlights” in December of 2016, in an attempt to reach their target demographics. In the spring of 2019, following the U.S. women’s national soccer team victory in the World Cup, Bleacher Report employee Ari Chambers (who follows Heaven on Twitter) identified the lack of women’s sports coverage on social media and set out to make that an afterthought. She started HighlightHer, formerly known as We Are Jayla, and ran the account across its Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok platforms. Chambers wanted to build a community centered around empowering women and after getting backing from former head of HoH, Omer Raja, the followers skyrocketed. Much like House of Highlights, HighlightHer offers a mix of user-generated content, as well as graphics and highlights that catch the eye. As of the time of writing, HighlightHer has 127k followers on Instagram, over 1500 followers on Tiktok, and over 1000 followers on an albeit-dormant Twitter. Instagram is their bread and butter, and they utilize features like IG Reels and IGTV to their advantage, garnering thousands of engagements every post. So, an actual area of improvement for them could be that they aren’t using the HighlightHer Twitter enough? Aside from that, Bleacher Report is probably the best platform when it comes to women’s sports coverage, aside from ESPN, and they use all their resources to their advantage.
Another area we identified that we figured could be an area of improvement was dedicated social media pages for almost every major sport. The main Bleacher Report page has over 15 million followers on Instagram and 9.6 million followers on Twitter, but could they sustain pages specific to football, basketball or baseball coverage? Then, we did our research and found out that Bleacher Report already did THAT too, years ago at this point. After acquiring House of Highlights in late 2016, Bleacher Report basically cornered the basketball coverage market with that maneuver. They didn’t stop there however, launching the soccer-centric B/R Football in 2017 and a page based around gambling, B/R Betting in 2018. Then, in August of 2019, Bleacher Report wanted to increase their football coverage and launched the page B/R Gridiron ahead of the 2019 NFL season. They premiered a ton of original shows like the hilarious animated shorts “Gridiron Heights”, spending a significant amount of money and programming on this endeavor. B/R Gridiron was now on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, snagging a ton of engagements and followers from day one. These platforms, along with pages like B/R Kicks, B/R Gaming, and B/R Walkoff (baseball), showcase that Bleacher Report simply won’t just do the bare minimum. Each of these pages are successful in their own right, producing original content and graphics for thousands, or in B/R Football’s case, millions of followers, and it’s clear Bleacher Report already thought to expand their coverage with specific sports. And like we mentioned earlier, HighlightHer provides not only user-generated content, but news and original content as well so while it might not have the B/R in front of it, it’s still a page designed for the same purpose as the other ones we’ve named. So, what we thought could be a potential improvement, turns out Bleacher Report already made these moves years ago. We don’t think Bleacher Report is missing a key way they could be relating to the consumers at all, because there really is something for everybody. If you want gambling-specific or soccer-specific content, they have profiles for that. If you want to laugh without scrolling past article after article, check out their TikTok with over two million followers or the House of Highlights TikTok with almost nine million. You want more women’s sports coverage? Check out their Instagram HighlightHer, launched by Bleacher Report and backed by House of Highlights, growing in followers by the day with their unique mix of user-generated content and personal stories. Bleacher Report just continues to get bigger and better and it’s because their sports coverage is so all-encompassing. They really leave little to no room for glaring improvements.
So, the “areas of improvement” section was basically a wash, since it seems like Bleacher Report has done anything and everything. However, one social media platform we think they could utilize more is “Medium”. After doing some research, we found that the Bleacher Report Design Team has a Medium account, but it only has 30 followers and has been pretty dormant since 2019, outside of an article on April 13th about building effective teams with leadership philosophies. We think Bleacher Report could benefit from using the platform Medium because it’s an online publishing platform, with a bit of a social network element. It’s free to publish and free to read most of the articles on the site. With about 60 million monthly active users, it could be a nice platform for Bleacher Report to republish their articles after they post them on their website and other apps, to extend their reach and the lifespan of these articles. Some other platforms that we think Bleacher Report could utilize are Baidu Tieba (the Chinese alternative to Reddit), QZone and WeChat. All of these apps are super popular in China, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users. QZone is a desktop-based social networking platform, where users can upload multimedia, publish blogs, and play games, among other things; this app is more popular with the younger crowd. WeChat, which is more popular with adults, is a mobile alternative that grew from a messaging app to include so much more. I’m not sure what the regulations are in China or if they have an alternative to Bleacher Report over there, but I think it would definitely be worth a shot. Especially since Bleacher Report already has profiles on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest. All in all, Bleacher Report could use those three Chinese social networking apps to increase their global reach and appeal to an even bigger audience. When it comes to specific tactics on their platforms that they already utilize, Bleacher Report does almost everything to perfection. They use IG Reels and IG Stories, House of Highlights has them taken care of on Snapchat, and they utilize crowdsourcing with polls on Instagram and Twitter. It’s clear that Bleacher Report is really head and shoulders above everyone else when it comes to sports social media.
In conclusion, with the rise of social media Bleacher Report has grown to be one of the world’s most engaging publishers in any field. Their goal has always been to give the audience the best experience possible, and they’ve done just that. Lee Walker, the Global Managing Editor for Bleacher Report among other things noted years ago that the goal was to go where the people are and make great content, and your engagements will soar. No more homepages, but rather focus on social media, changing the narrative and utilizing multimedia content to continue to grow in popularity. Now, over the past few years with their acquisition of House of Highlights and launching of several sports-dedicated platforms, it’s clear that not only is Bleacher Report here to stay, but they’re going to continue to get even better.
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