I have included a section of the blog post below. For the full post, check out www.sportsmarketing20.com.
What value does ‘3-Point Play’ add to the Celtics’ Facebook page?
The value is very high, it allows to entertain and capture Facebook fans whom we'd otherwise never know anything about, and it helps us build our audience by giving fans something to do when they come across our Facebook presence. We were the first team in the NBA to launch a Facebook app, and among the first teams in North America to do it when we launched in the fall of 2009. So I think we led the way a bit when it came to pro teams building out their Facebook strategy, we were definitely ahead of the curve in that regard.
I think too many teams look at their Facebook page as another homepage, but the reality is that Facebook is a completely different medium. The newsfeed is where all the action is at; your Facebook fans may never even see your Facebook page if you don't drive them back there. You can't rely on them visiting your page on their own, you need to give them incentives to do so. If you're going to ask for contact info, there has to be a value exchange. But the good news for us is that we can get in front of our fans whenever we want to by posting to the newsfeed. About 33% of our audience sees each post we put out, and for our audience of 3 million+ fans, that equates to about 1 million fans worldwide for every status update. You're never going to reach a number anywhere close to that on your own website.
Again, you can read the entire post here.