The US Open Tennis Championships voice is unexpected, bold and energetic. Every word should reflect and embody the spirit of our home, New York City. The social media team used Twitter banter as an opportunity to lean into this unique tennis voice to make our brand stand out amongst our Grand Slam counterparts, and have a little fun too.
To a New Yorker, when someone insults a sport you love – that’s personal. When we saw a user reply to a SportsCenter tweet about tennis, “not a sport,” we had to step in. We replied to @seahawksfan2314, “not a sport says the person about to watch 17 games of Drew Lock at QB.” As the reply began to go viral, our team produced and published several follow-up tweets and other content to support this interaction with the troll. From graphic and video memes, and even a link to tickets in the “here’s my sound cloud” viral tweet follow-up we all know and love.
This individual tweet reply had over 93k engagements.
But, from July 2 to July 4, @USOpen Twitter gained 5665 followers (3.5x the 3-day average). This interaction was highlighted by many influential accounts including NFL analysts, sports media outlets, Seahawks players and even Drew Lock himself.
This viral interaction occurred during Wimbledon, so having the spotlight shift from their tournament to ours while the coverage of this tweet was talked about across sports social media was an added bonus.
At the core of it, this viral tweet got people talking about our brand and sport [about 60 days before our own event began], who may have never watched a single minute of tennis in their lives. But now they know who we are, and that tennis social media is not going to take trolls lightly.