Case Study 01:
Pro Football Focus Strategy & Systems Overhaul
PFF’s social presence was built around volume & posting at a high frequency in order to hit an unrealistic KPI, but with no true strategy behind it.
There was no brand voice, no platform - specific look & feel, no community management efforts and no real creative framework outside of a few templates.
Each platform was operating in isolation with no cohesive identity, tying everything together across each vertical.
With this approach - the goal was to compete with the likes of ESPN, the NFL, Bleacher Report, etc. And when we try to compete with those levels of following, we will never be satisfied.
The Situation:
The Strategy:
A full shift from an output-focused sprint to a strategy & creativity-first team culture.
From scratch, we had to build the infrastructure, voice and feedback loops needed to turn the PFF social channels into a differentiated, recognizable brand in a very saturated sports social space.
The PFF brand was already a known one in football, but it needed a full refresh on how it shows up on social with first-class data at the forefront.
We didn’t need to join the Bleacher Reports & ESPNs of the world who own the coverage - we needed to own the week. The review and preview is our lane.
The Tools:
-
Establishing PFF’s personality on social
-
Each platform & each vertical needs its own direction that fits the overall strategy
-
Revised responsibilities, pointed weekly meetings & new request processes
-
Making video efforts not just higher quality, but optimized for each platform and different use cases
The Results:
1.5B Impressions
|
40M Engagements
|
120M Original Video Views
|
1.5B Impressions | 40M Engagements | 120M Original Video Views |
Established PFF's first unified voice, with platform-specific adaptations for each channel. PFF had the data. The goal was giving the consumer a personality they actually wanted to follow & regularly engage with beyond the data of their favorite team.
Launched PFF’s always-on community management practice across all verticals (Main, College, Fantasy, & Betting channels)
Defined clear boundaries between brand voice and editorial voice, ensuring social content felt distinct from PFF's written & analytical content
These tactics led to over 40M total engagements in just 8 months
Brand Tone & Voice Guide
The personality guide is a useful resource to go back to when the team was stuck on captions or was trying to come up with a comment/response for community management purposes.
With past issues (non-social) of the brand coming across as all-knowing & a bit condescending, this is how we define exactly how far to push it before it stops being PFF and starts being noise.
The personality framework closes the gap between data brand and social brand and gave the team permission to be witty, timely, and social-forward without undermining credibility
Every piece of copy runs through all five traits & before anything publishes, the voice is checked against the full personality framework to ensure PFF sounds like PFF regardless of who wrote it or which platform it lives on
When building the initial strategy, community management was a non-negotiable part of the day to day to reach our engagement goals.
While simple, responding to our own comments was a needed first step in order to educate and ensure we’re making the consumer feel heard.
We wanted to become a brand in that’s in every football comment section. And not just on Saturdays & Sundays, but every day. We want to be the data company full of personable ball-knowers.
Community engagement efforts also gives us an entire avenue of content to create with. And on top of a new content avenue, it’s another layer of engagement watching people get excited to see themselves in a PFF post.
The audience personas are the core of our brand voice & community management efforts. The social personas are usable across all sectors of the marketing department.
Platform behavior becomes clearer with personas. The Edge Seeker lives on X for real-time updates, The Casual stops the scroll on Instagram, The Data Sicko engages in comments and shares insights they find. Knowing who lives where shapes where and how you show up
Content decisions become intentional, not instinctual & every post can be mapped back to a persona, ensuring the content mix serves the full audience rather than defaulting to what's easiest.
Our brand voice stays consistent but flexible because the personas give the team permission to shift tone without losing identity.
Community management then becomes a better mix of proactive, not reactive because we can think through the responses and engage with purpose.
Platform Playbooks
Developed platform-specific playbooks for Instagram, X, & TikTok as part of the master social strategy – each defining its own content mix, visual identity, posting cadence, tone, and format priorities.
Defined content format priorities per platform to ensure the team was producing the right asset types rather than repurposing one piece of content across all channels
Designed each platform playbook to give the content team a clear, repeatable framework & eliminate guesswork, ensuring every piece of content published had a strategic reason behind it.
Instagram Playbook
Instagram Results
X Playbook
X Results
TikTok Playbook
TikTok Results
New Systems & Workflows
Insert here
Weekly Team Ideation
Held every Monday to start the week sparking creativity.
Each member of the social & content team is required to bring at least three ideas to the table, whether that was a graphic style they saw, a video concept or a copy format that be done with a PFF twist.
The third Monday of the month is solely dedicated to video ideation. The goal with this was to give our video editors ideas for new series, transitions, texts styles or concepts that we would trial in our 4-week test runs (mentioned below)
Friday Film Room
Held every Friday with Senior Leadership - allowing the team to end the week with direct feedback & open discussion.
Each social media manager & creative lead brought a short slideshow each week that covered the best & worst posts, any notable community management & successful design/video concepts from that week.
The results of Friday Film Room were resoundingly positive, as social media managers were able to adjust with clear guidelines, while middle management & senior leadership got the opportunity to create a true feedback loop leading into a weekend of game coverage.
Video Testing & Learning
As mentioned in the “Optimizing for Video” section, our video testing process allowed us to take big swings with our video content and ensure that any decision or adjustment we made was backed & confirmed by performance analytics.
-
The third Monday of the month is solely dedicated to video ideation.
The goal with this was to give our video editors ideas for new series, transitions, texts styles or concepts that we would test that following month. -
After the Video Only Ideation Meeting, our Social Video Lead & Middle Management would review all of the different concepts, discuss workflow, bandwith & potential adjustments.
From there, the team narrows the list down to 3 that we feel have the most legs in terms of timeliness and potential engagement. -
4 weeks with a 1-3 per week posting cadence depending on the concept allows us to have a true runway to understand how the audience is digesting the content.
This gives us much more analytic confirmation vs posting the concept once and making the decision based on that, good or bad. -
Using Dash Social, we built a “board” for each series. This allows us to keep all of the posts for the month in one place, gather totals for metrics and make notes of about each video.
Having all of the data centralized in order to make an informed decision allows us to stay organized within this system.
Efficient Content Requests
New Meeting Structures
Asana Request System
Built a centralized graphic request system in Asana to replace an informal process that was creating bottlenecks and miscommunication between the social managers and creatives
Standardized the request workflow so every ask came in with the right information and creative context to eliminate the back-and-forth that slows down production
Introduced a priority-based queue system so our graphic designers could work in the right order, ensuring tentpole and time-sensitive content was never competing with evergreen requests for bandwidth’s sake
This practice required an added layer of detail from every social manager submitting a request, which in turn raises the quality of our creative briefs and resulted in fewer revisions and faster turnaround on final assets in a space that required us to find the balance of speed & quality.
Optimizing for Video
Video was identified early as the highest-leverage opportunity across PFF's social channels. At a brand built on data and analysis, video gave us the ability to do what graphics alone couldn't, bring the needed context, elevate our talent, and reach audiences who of all personas of fans.
Optimizing for video was a core strategic priority that touched every platform, every content format, and every content creation decision we made.
The results backed it up - 120M video views and counting, with engagement and reach numbers that proved the audience was hungry for more.
Test & Learn
Built a structured video testing system around three new concepts per month, each tracked over a four-week window to generate enough data to make meaningful decisions rather than reactive ones
Tracked all of our test content performance inside a Dash Social board, creating a single source of review for video analytics that allowed the team to evaluate concepts side by side with full context.
Ensured every decision around short form series and new content formats was backed by real performance data so we could limit gut-feel content choices and replace them with a repeatable, evidence-based creative process
Fostered a creative culture where no concept was too risky to try and all ideas from all corners of the team are welcome. The testing system gave the team the freedom to experiment knowing that every result, positive or negative, would inform the next decision
4×5 = Context
Introduced 4x5 video as a strategic content format that paired our strong eye-catching graphics with added video context, giving PFF's talent a platform to expand on data points and quotes rather than letting the graphic speak alone.
The format drove nine figures in total impressions and eight figures in engagements, proving that audiences wanted more than a static data point & that they wanted the deeper insight or explaination behind it
This allowed us to constantly strengthen the credibility of both PFF's talent and brand by allowing analysts to go deeper on their takes, turning a single piece of content into a richer, more authoritative moment
Repositioned video on Instagram from a secondary format to a primary content driver — proving that PFF's audience didn't just want the data, they wanted to understand it
Cohesive Grids
Identified early that video cover frames across Instagram and TikTok were inconsistent and underperforming, failing to stop the scroll or signal the quality of the content behind them
Led a testing and iteration process across multiple cover styles and formats before landing on a design direction that felt intentional, on-brand, and platform-specific
The result was a visually cohesive grid across both Instagram and TikTok, one that immediately communicated high-level content and made the overall feed feel like a curated, premium content destination rather than a collection of individual posts
Established cover frame standards as a non-negotiable part of the video production process, ensuring every piece of content looked intentional before it ever hit the feed