It has been announced in today’s WTA press release that the Tour and its players have reached the fan base of 23 million on social media sites, which is an increase of four times in the past 18 months.
The most marketable women’s athlete, Maria Sharapova, is leading on Facebook with 5.3 million followers and that number is growing by 250.000 each month. Serena Williams‘ tweets are the most popular and more than 2.1 million people follow her on Twitter. Li Na is spreading the tennis influence in China and she has 2.7 million fans on Sina Weibo.
Stacey Allaster, Chairman and CEO of the WTA, said that the growth is positively affecting the WTA’s player, tournament and sponsor businesses and such a digital engagement will thus remain one of strategic priorities.
Besides well-known social media channels of Facebook and Twitter, WTA’s campaign “Strong is Beautiful” received close to 1.8 million views on YouTube and online TV show series “Xperia Hot Shots” attracted close to 819.000 Facebook fans and achieved 3 million YouTube views in a matter of months.
Of course, don’t forget to join Women’s Tennis Blog on Twitter and Facebook. I hope that the WTA will start counting my blog in their social media community numbers. (photos by FIJI Water and our reader Colleen)
