Overtime’s social media strategy is all about next-gen sports fans

This story is the tenth in a series about how marketers for sports teams and leagues around the world approach social media strategy.

Druski, Tee Grizzley, Kai Cenat. Recognize any of these names?

Those who do probably are Gen Z, which might mean they get sports news from the sports media company Overtime—or have at least come across its content on social media.

In addition to creating content, Overtime operates basketball, football, and boxing leagues, whose athletes are also largely on the younger side: its boxing platform features mostly fighters in their 20s and basketball and football players who are predominantly teenagers. Gen Z also helps run the show on Overtime’s social accounts, CEO Dan Porter said. Both keeping that young audience in mind and hiring them has helped the company’s content game since it was founded in 2016, he told Marketing Brew.

“When we started, you had to look at who the competition at that point was, and it might be an ESPN, or a SportsCenter, maybe a Bleacher Report,” Porter said. “You have to say internally, ‘We should never publish a post that those guys would publish, because we can’t compete with them.’ The only way that we can compete with them is knowing our audience segment, which is younger people, and talking to them in their voice.”

How do you do, fellow kids?

Overtime’s target demographics are between the ages of 13 and 24, Porter said, and over 81% of its audience is under the age of 35. Porter, who is in his fifties, isn’t afraid to admit he doesn’t always speak their language.

“Five years ago, Druski was making fun of me because I used to shake his hand, and he’d be like, ‘That’s the guy who doesn’t dap me up,” Porter said.

Overtime’s accounts have a combined 100+ million followers across seven platforms, and the company says it sees upward of 3 billion views per month. The goal across social is not to teach Porter and his fellow Gen Xers what “dapping up” is.

Instead, he said, “You just hire young people to run your accounts, and you don’t tell them what to do, and you cover a lot of young athletes.” That goes even younger than college sports. Overtime covered University of Colorado Boulder football stars Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter back when they were 16, he said; Now, both make podcasts with the company.

Beyond bringing athletes onboard to help create content, Overtime hires TikTok creators, college-aged recruits, and fans of the brand, Porter said. Overtime creator Quincy Helsel, a recent high-school graduate, for instance, got hired a few years after sliding into Porter’s DMs when he was still in high school, Porter said.

“Every person who’s going to run a social account for Overtime in the future, is 16 years old right now, and they follow us, and they’re a die-hard fan,” he said.

First off the mark

Nowadays, major sports organizations seem to have figured out that highlights aren’t the only content that fans want to see, and plenty are breaking into the kind of content that Porter said Overtime has made for a long time.

“There’s a lot of good teams on social media,” he said. “They do a lot of the stuff that we did seven years ago: miking up the players, asking them what their favorite Halloween candy is. Six or seven years ago, nobody did that.”

With player personality content becoming more common on social media feeds, Overtime has adapted its strategy. In 2023, the company signed a content deal with the NFL, and it became a league distribution partner this March. Over the summer, Overtime joined forces with NBCU to help cover the Olympics for a younger audience, despite never having published Olympic content before, Porter said. The Overtime team convinced NBCU they were right for the job based on their experience covering “young athletes and their personalities,” he said.

In two weeks, Overtime generated 75 million views “on sports we’ve never covered,” Porter said, like track and field and swimming. The content team took their usual approach, like asking Suni Lee about her “Jordan flu game moment” and having Olympic swimmers and gymnasts weigh in about what other Olympians they’d like to see compete in their sports.

On the heels of Overtime’s partnerships with the NFL and NBCU, Porter said the company is discussing opportunities with other professional sports leagues to make similar content.

For now, though, Overtime is remaining focused on basketball, football, and combat sports, since he said that’s the content its followers want. OTX, Overtime’s boxing platform, generated 4.5 billion views on boxing content in the past year, averaging 300,000 new monthly followers, and now has about 4 million on TikTok and Instagram combined, according to Overtime. But despite hordes of sponsors, Overtime, it seems, isn’t quite betting on the likes of pickleball just yet.

“You’re not going to walk away from this hearing from me that cornhole, lacrosse, whatever, whatever, is the next big thing, because honestly, it isn’t,” Porter said.