You’ve heard of Strava right? The website and mobile app for you to track your athletic endeavours by GPS. Well it just got an upgrade and now it’s the social platform you haven’t used to its full potential. Love sport? Love stories? Love Strava.

Strava already had it down in terms of interface and usability. It has become the platform of choice for first cyclists then runners to upload their routes and runs and document progress. What was originally a tool for users to record activities so as to compare them, Strava quickly identified that people were interacting with each other. And then introduced further ways for users to interact with one another in the traditional social media sense – liking, commenting, following.

AND IT’S JUST HAD AN UPGRADE

As well as a social feed of your own activities and those of profiles you follow, Strava is now allowing Clubs and Brands to create events, share stories (blog posts), post announcements and start discussions amongst users. Not only will club members be able to interact with one another, but receive push notifications from other users. This is also significant for club owners and brands who can share messages and promotional activities via a channel with a dedicated target audience.

WHY IT MAKES SENSE FOR INFLUENCERS

If you are an exercise enthusiast and are sharing your runs, then why wouldn’t you also comment, like, share, sign up for events, all in the same place? But Strava is also becoming important as it is increasingly being used as a social channel. If you are an athlete or an influencer, you are now able to:

– share your stories
– interact with followers and grow your own audience
– and link directly to other social channels; Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, helping with organic growth in numbers

There are over 100,000 active Clubs on Strava, 30 of whom have been identifies as Beta Clubs i.e. the club or brand can post directly to members rather than individuals and Strava has over 1,000,000 active users. It’s a flourishing community that will continue to grow, both in terms of active users, but also visitors who increasingly see Strava as an authentic news and information resource for endurance sports.

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Over 100 influencers on Freestak have deemed Strava to be important for their social reach and engagement and have linked their accounts to their Freestak profiles. At Freestak, we concur that the Strava platform will become, if it isn’t already, significant for social networking and sharing. The more that people identify a niche and can communicate to that target audience the more valuable the medium of communication becomes. As Freestak-ers are content creators, we are sure that as Strava recognises the importance of and begins to further promote features like ‘Stories‘, influencers will not only be a part of teams, clubs and communities, but increasingly become a prominent part of the content creation process.

We feel that for endurance sports and outdoors enthusiasts, there are several interesting platforms that influencers will find exciting in 2017. Brands like Suunto and Garmin are continually playing catch up with social channels to try to harness the power of communities. However it seems that Strava has a head start. Their platform is continually innovating and new product management teams introducing new functionality where users go not just to document and track their own performance, but create content and engagement with like minded audiences. This is super important and one of the reasons, Strava is striving to be the social platform of choice for endurance sports and outdoors.

 

---

Want to learn more about the Freestak platform? ?? www.freestak.com/influencers
Not signed up yet? ?? www.my.freestak.com
Signed up but not linked your Strava account? ?? www.my.freestak.com/accounts
Photo Credits: All images via Strava.