The Pittsburgh Penguins New Media Team’s All Star Performance

Successfully engaging your fans on digital is not an easy task. Yet the Pittsburgh Penguins make it look effortless.

In fact, Adweek examined the social media profiles of all 31 NHL teams and found that the Penguins are finding tremendous success on social. In fact, CrowdTangle data shows that since the beginning of the season until the end of January, NHL teams have averaged close to 800,000 Twitter interactions and 4.1 million interactions on Instagram. As for the Penguins? Their numbers are over 3X bigger — recording 2.3 million interactions on Twitter and 9.2 million on Instagram. What does this mean? Quite simply, it proves that the Penguins’ new media team has a tremendous understanding of what really resonates with their fans.

If you’re thinking their digital success is only on their social channels, you should think again. The Penguins have carried this success on social into their mobile app and are now also at the top of the charts when it comes to their app strategy.

Recently, they launched a multi-platform digital campaign for the NHL’s Last Men In. For this activation, each team had to promote one of their players to get sufficient fan votes to be the last representative in their division to make it to the All-Star Game.

With a very worthy nominee in defensemen Kris Letang, the Penguins turned to digital to engage their loyal fans to vote. While the voting link was placed on their social channels, the team took it one step further by creating an engaging voting experience on their mobile app as well.

As the app experience was created in the Rover platform, the team was able to use the same experience they designed for their app, on their social channels. And the results were powerful.

Andi Perelman, the Penguins’ Director of New Media shared with us that the Vote for Letang tweet containing the Rover experience received 337,016 impressions. And that’s not all. The post also scored a 1.41x impact score on Trackmaven, indicating that the post performed 41% better relative to their season content.

And the campaign didn’t just resonate on Twitter. In fact, in true Penguins’ fashion, the team took it to the next level by also adding it to their Instagram Story. With a quick swipe up, fans were presented with a persuasive piece of content that walked their fans through the reasoning that fans should vote for Letang and easily directed them to the voting page. Overall, between their social channels and their app, the experience received over 16,000 opens and had a 55% click-through rate. Incredible!

But the best part? It worked!

Coupled with Letang’s talent, loyal Penguins fans’ efforts, and the hard work of the Penguins’ new media team, Kris Letang was named as the Last Man In for the Metropolitan Division to represent Pittsburgh in San Jose.

Oh, and to no one’s surprise, Letang didn’t let the fans — or his digital team — down. With teammate Sidney Crosby, the Metropolitan division went on to win the All-Star Game.

Congratulations to the Penguins’ new media team who continue to push the envelope with regards to digital and social innovation!