Why Ecclestone and F1 need Twitter

Twitter is a divisive subject in motorsport. It is easily misunderstood, with Bernie Ecclestone a prime example, but if used correctly can be a powerful tool that engages fans and has commercial benefits for the teams.

It's easy to dismiss social media as a technological fad, but it's not about hashtags or trends, it's the audience they represent. The best use of Twitter isn't to patronise the #bestfans, nor is it for a driver just to let the world know that their breakfast that day was particularly satisfying. The real benefit lies somewhere in the middle, with different parts of the sport taking on different roles.

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS

Formula 1 has a global fanbase, but is largely inaccessible to its audience. Far more can sit at home than can sit in a grandstand, thus the ways for teams to showcase what happens off-track are wide-ranging.

After a quite dormant existence the F1 Twitter account fired into life mid-season, transforming itself from something that existed for the sake of it to an active, informative tool. By the end of November, @F1 had more than one million followers on the popular micro-blogging site - an increase of 50 per cent over the season.

But follower count isn't everything on Twitter. In fact, it's becoming less and less relevant.

Engagement, how much your followers interact with you and how much your content is shared, is the true test of social-media prowess. Quality trumps quantity.

Lotus is particularly playful with social media © LAT

FOM's role in F1's social strategy need not be a direct one. Its improvements to the official F1 account are along the right lines, so the main focus needs to be helping the evolution and growth of the teams' individual accounts. They are the places the fans will go for interaction and they are the places the sport will benefit from a proper social media strategy.

What teams have done is attempt to break down the barrier between the fans and the paddock, and Twitter affords that opportunity. F1 doesn't stop once the television cameras have been turned off on Sunday evening, so why limit its reach? Especially when, with teams in control of the accounts, the sport can tailor its messaging to suit.

Pushing social media will only help bring the sport's previously off-limits moments into the spotlight. That has been embraced more earnestly by teams in the second half of this year, with Red Bull embedding video of Sebastian Vettel driving through the streets of Austin directly into its feed and McLaren inviting 15 "super fans" to its Woking headquarters.

Teams have more to showcase, and a dynamic approach works best. Mercedes is the most interactive with its followers - the result of a deliberate strategy to build its audience on social-media platforms this year - and engenders high levels of engagement as a result.

Conversely, while the popularity of Ferrari is without question, its style on social media reads as a newsletter - here is the announcement, click to read it on our website. That has a negative impact on its effectiveness online.

If you take the social-media equivalent of TV coverage - often referred to as the "share of voice" - then according to leading social media analyst Repucom Mercedes dominated the Twittersphere in 2014, comfortably ahead of its rivals and with a larger social media share of voice than a share of TV coverage

POTENTIAL NOT WITHOUT PITFALLS

"I chose Twitter from the beginning because I thought it was the most simple way of doing it and communicating with the fans," explains double world champion Fernando Alonso, who has over two million followers, regularly posts in Spanish and English and intends to ramp up his activity now his time at Ferrari is over.

"It's fun, it's good to share a little bit of our unknown life to our fans. From now on, I think I will be on Twitter a bit more, like in the past, because this year has been a little bit restricted."

Grosjean has cause to rue auto-scheduled tweeting © LAT

Twitter is the key to unlock to F1's personality prison. But it's not without its problems. Conspiracy theorists in particular jump in all guns blazing whenever there's a whiff of controversy - Sebastian Vettel "passing" Jean-Eric Vergne under yellow flags on his way to defeating Alonso in the 2012 title fight and the storm that raged following Jules Bianchi's horror crash in the Japanese Grand Prix this year concerning whether the marshals had done their jobs properly. It's unfounded and detracts from more serious issues.

Using the same topic, Bianchi's fight for survival, Twitter has brought together fans and drivers with the adoption of the #ForzaJules trend, something that also occurred following Michael Schumacher's skiing accident (#KeepFightingMichael).

F1's PR side can also muddy the waters. Lewis Hamilton brought his issues here on himself following telemetry-gate at Spa in 2012, when he posted a picture of his and then-McLaren team-mate Jenson Button's telemetry from qualifying. The fallout didn't quite bring down the Iron Curtain, but a more controlled social-media strategy followed. But eyebrows were raised when a post was made to one of Hamilton's accounts 'from my iPhone', when Mercedes had sponsorship from Blackberry.

Like anything else, socialing has its pitfalls. Romain Grosjean set up an automatic Tweet announcing his re-signing at Lotus earlier this year, only for the official confirmation to be delayed. This is one of the more amusing anecdotes - "My phone went crazy with it being tweeted and I went 'no, no, no!'" he remembers.

"You will never see a picture of my son," the Frenchman continues, "because I believe that this is 100 per cent private. But it's nice to be as close as you can to people."

MONEY TO BE MADE

Mercedes claims it has a following of 10 million across the leading social-media platforms Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. That audience is the result of a deliberate strategy.

With more fans invested in it, F1/FOM's social-media market becomes stronger.

Making money out of Twitter is a tricky topic, but what Ecclestone is relying on his new working group to ascertain is whether it is possible and the best way to achieve it.

But the short answer is that there is money to be made.

Understanding how to use social media is a boost to F1's commercial appeal - and a highly-regarded asset in terms of sponsorship proposals - but the future lies in making money from the audience it helps generate and grow.

Williams is wary of attempts to monetise social media © XPB

Claire Williams, who will chair the new Popularity Working Group, has been one of the most vocal F1 figures on this subject. F1's future probably lies in the direction of a combined social-media strategy, with the teams working together to build up a paddock-wide brand rather than just looking after individual interest.

"We haven't drilled down into that level of detail in that meeting, but it is something we will look at and hopefully do as a group," Williams said recently in Abu Dhabi. "At the moment we do all our social media as individual teams - but I think if we did something collectively it could be really powerful."

That, in turn, can take the dialogue with fans to the next level, and turn it into a revenue stream - something social-media expert WePlay calls the Fan Adoption Journey. While this is arguably where F1's social-media future lies, Williams is keen to proceed with caution.

"I said a while ago that for me in the short-term, monetising social media is not where I personally see it," she added. "If we want to make F1 accessible to fans they don't expect to pay for the basic stuff.

"There are obviously things you can develop that you could expect people to pay for but we need to embrace racing fans, not monetise everything we do."

Opinions are divided on how to achieve that next step, but patience should be the order of the day. Twitter can have financial benefits but its primary purpose is to engage and entertain, which makes it an opportunity for F1 to improve its image. If greed turns it into a fan-fed cash cow, it could achieve the opposite.

HOW OTHER SERIES DO IT

Plenty of championships have adopted social media as an essential promotional tool, though Formula E's arrival turned it into a weapon for success as much as anything else.

The all-electric series' FanBoost idea meant Twitter and Facebook became channels for teams to drum up support for their drivers in order to win a 67kw (90bhp) power boost during the race.

Unsurprisingly that proved divisive. Some fans liked having some kind of influence, while purists saw it as a gimmick and little more. In a social-media context it falls short of the aim of generating engagement, too; the common tactic has been to simply encourage fans to vote instead of giving them a reason to.

Fans can influence FE's race outcomes via Twitter © LAT

Other, more traditional, series have also invested in Twitter, and for reasons that extend deeper than attempting to drum up an artificial conversation.

NASCAR chief marketing officer Steve Phelps said in 2012 that it had been an important part of its drive to "further engage our fanbase and help grow the sport". The seeds laid in previous years have continued to bear fruit, with America's premier motorsport category enjoying unparalleled support online, with 1.6million followers compared with national rival IndyCar's 140,000.

Despite a strong core of drivers, some of whom enjoy good levels of support personally like Juan Pablo Montoya and Tony Kanaan, IndyCar has toiled in social-media terms.

With a new headline sponsor in telecommunications giant Verizon, IndyCar's much-desired follower count increased by 50 per cent, but the more telling statistic is the dozens of NASCAR/F1 posts that received thousands of shares, compared to the select few IndyCar tweets that crept into three figures. It may seem a pedantic point, but shares are essentially (though not always) public endorsements.

A conservative strategy from teams and drivers might be a by-product of the series' strict social-media policy, which Helio Castroneves fell foul of earlier this year, ending up on probation after a derogatory tweet about an official's decision at Long Beach was posted on his account by his sister.

The British Touring Car Championship is heavily invested in social media. Its most successful offerings are competition-based, which help validate existing fans and potentially bring potential new ones into the fold. Social support is a big asset here as it is more likely to translate into numbers on the gate.