Data: How Paddy Power Betfair won the Cheltenham social stakes

As the last racegoer stepped away from March’s Cheltenham Festival, it signalled the end of yet another big weekend for the bookmakers and one in which they have invested a significant effort in terms of customer engagement through social media and content creation.

As in previous years, Britain’s leading bookmakers were publishing huge quantities of content to reach out to their audiences, but how effective were they? We looked at the social media strategies of the leading bookmakers and, using our social media scorecard, assessed how effective they were at reaching their audiences over the critical Cheltenham Festival period.

And as was the case last year, it was the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power that was leading the way on social media over the Cheltenham week, leading our social media index with a score of 113.2 out of a possible 120. However, this year Paddy Power was joined by its group stablemate Betfair which, despite being some way behind Paddy Power with a score of 75.9, was the second-most prominent brand on social media.

Bet365 and Ladbrokes were close behind with scores of 74.3 and 65.7 respectively, but it was very much Paddy Power that once again led the field thanks to a high volume, high engagement social content strategy.

Paddy Power leads on volume, but let down by Facebook engagement
Much of Paddy Power’s high score is attributed to the sheer volume of content that it produced over the course of the Cheltenham week, and the sheer size of the audience that it reaches on those platforms.

As we can see in our volume index, the brand was the clear leader in terms of audience size, with a larger Facebook, Twitter and YouTube audience than the rest of the competition by some considerable margin.

Bet365 is the brand with the next largest audience following, with largely similar audiences across Facebook and Twitter, and a respectable volume of YouTube subscribers. Betfair has the second-largest YouTube audience of the brands we analysed.

But what is interesting in the case of Paddy Power is that it is potentially missing out on opportunities on Facebook where, despite having the largest potential audience, it doesn’t seem to be producing content that engages on that platform.

While there is no question from our engagement index that the brand’s content is working exceptionally well on Twitter, it is only the fourth most engaging brand on Facebook. This could be an indication that the content the brand is producing isn’t translating as well to the Facebook platform, and this may be something that the brand looks to address.

Ladbrokes hits the mark on Facebook, but lacks the volume
Ladbrokes, it seems, has quite the opposite challenge to overcome. Looking at our volume index, the brand has only the sixth biggest Facebook following of the brands we analysed, but a look at our engagement index suggests that it is certainly producing content that works on that platform, and with its audience.

Ladbrokes went big on Cheltenham content, hosting a video update series with the Soccer Saturday legend Chris Kamara, and this seems to have resonated with the brand’s Facebook audience. What is interesting is that this video series doesn’t seem to have performed as well on YouTube, but our index does at least demonstrate that the brand has a content strategy that works on the Facebook platform.

The challenge for Ladbrokes is therefore twofold: Firstly, it needs to ensure that its content translates well to other platforms; secondly, it needs to grow those audiences and build up a strong, engaged following across all channels. This could be achieved through a blend of paid social promotion and targeted communications to drive its customer base to its social channels, and could ensure that its investment in content delivers a greater return.