The UFC Summit was held this week in which fighters met with Zuffa owners in Las Vegas to discuss a myriad of things from health and taxes to public relations. One tidbit of information from the summit is that fighters will be paid to use Twitter.
My question would be why were more fighters not actively using social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube?
I wrote a post about 3 or 4 years ago basically asking the same question. There were more ‘major’ promotions back then and I use that term loosely, but fighters had more options like the IFL, WEC, Strikeforce, and Affliction to compete. Those companies had very little money for promotional purposes so it was up to the fighters to promote themselves, yet many of the fighters failed to do it or were not consistent enough to be effective. Some fighters have used the technology effectively, but there are a ton of fighters that still just don’t get it.
These platforms to communicate with fans are incredible. For example, look at the power UFC president Dana White yields on twitter. He has close to 2 million followers, can tweet that he is at a specific location and have hundreds of fans mobbing him within minutes to receive tickets to an upcoming UFC event. Jorge Rivera, who’s a good fighter with journeymen status, used three wins in a row and a series of youtube videos to hype up his fight against Michael Bisping at UFC 127. Let’s be honest, nobody is remotely interested in a Rivera/Bisping match-up without the YouTube videos that Rivera produced.
Fighters can use Facebook or Twitter to communicate directly with fans, which could lead to them doing seminars and other things which would help them gain new fans and potentially develop another source of income. Former UFC champion Tito Ortiz used Youtube videos to document his training sessions after back surgery which garnered over 200,000 views. Check out the video blogs that some fighters do leading up their fights, it’s usually good stuff. The technology can aide with everything from training, to developing a fanbase, to just keeping your name in the mix while you are out of action due to injuries.
Yet, there were fighters in the UFC that didn’t even have twitter accounts AT ALL, or if they did had not used the account for months on end. That’s ridiculous, yet there are fighters that are very active on twitter. UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones(who was very active before he became champion), Kurt Pellegrino, John Howard, Josh Koscheck, and Kenny Florian all come to mind as fighters who are already very active on Twitter. Coincidentally, these fighters are some of the more popular fighters in the UFC. Now all of their popularity isn’t tied directly to their activity on Twitter, but their presence there certainly hasn’t been detrimental to their careers either.
I think it’s a good move by the UFC to basically encourage fighters to promote themselves as long as the fighters don’t abuse it. I mean, don’t want to see a barrage of tweets in my timeline because fighter A is trying to get more followers so he can get paid. However, I have no problem with fighters communicating with fans in a genuine manner.
Georges St-Pierre and Urijah Faber come to mind when talking about fighters that have or are developing a brand. The UFC has created a brand that sells itself, yet fighters need to do the same thing. There are not many Randy Couture’s in this world, you can’t fight forever so take advantage of everything available to you while you can.