Social Media Breakdown: Bill Simmons

T: @BillSimmons

F: @BillSimmons

I: @sptguy33

Bill Simmons journalism career has taken some interesting twists and turns. He studied political science at the College of the Holy Cross and then received his masters in print journalism at Boston University. He worked a number of jobs in and around Boston and maintaining a website called BostonSportsGuy.com.

He was recruited to join ESPN as a guest columnist in 2001. One of his columns from that year ‘Is Clemens the Antichrist?’, written about controversial Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens, became one of the most shared articles of the year. His reach quickly grew and he was eventually given regular space on ESPN.com.

He is one of the first journalists to have a large writing following on the Internet. He was the editor-in-chief of the ESPN website, Grantland.com, launching in 2011, a website which covered sports and pop culture.

Simmons left ESPN for HBO in 2015, a multi-platform deal that was set to include a weekly talk show, Any Given Wednesday, but the show was cancelled just five months after it aired. In 2016, Simmons announced the launch of his new website, The Ringer, an extremely similar project to Grantland. The site leaves sports almost as an afterthought, with page slots for ‘NBA’ and ‘MLB’, but also for ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Movies’, and ‘Podcasts’.

With Simmons versatile career platform, his social media presence differs from the other breakdowns I have done. His Twitter profile picture is not a headshot, but a picture of loud Major League Baseball character Manny Ramirez in a Boston Red Sox uniform. His background image is a caricature-esque version of himself with a Boston Celtics logo, and his talk of popular movies and television shows outnumber his sports tweets practically two-to-one.

And yet it’s when he talks sports that people listen. His nearly 6 million followers interact with his sports tweets more so than his popular culture at an astonishing rate. His presence is changed to suit his pop culture interests, but it is poor for a sportswriter, which is the hat he’s wearing when people are listening to him.

His Facebook presence is extremely lacking in comparison to Twitter. He has only 400,000 likes, and the page seems very dedicated to popular culture, once again to only minimal interaction. To give a frame of reference, he averages only 20 or 30 likes on most of his posts, except one video of him with baseball cards, which got over 230,000 reactions.

His Instagram page seems more about his love affair with sports, hence the name ‘sptguy’, and it shows in his impact. He has over 173,000 followers, and averages somewhere between 3 and 4,000 likes per post, with some ranging upwards of 10 and 12,000. On both his Facebook and Instagram pages, he uses a more professional picture in his profile.

In conclusion, Simmons’ online presence lacks consistency, even if it doesn’t hurt for attention in many cases. He is attempting to maximize his career by joining the pop culture conversation, but he may actually be minimizing his impact. To truly improve his career, he may want to focus more on his sports, where he really draws and interest.