US Open Tennis Championships Instagram

The US Open’s approach to Instagram during the 2022 tournament is a best-in-class use of the new platform features to drive engagement and follower growth. The “cold Collab” method should be added to every piece of content published on the platform by all sports brands. The potential pay-off of another account accepting the Collab brings your piece of content to an entirely new audience, increasing metrics and partnering your brand with theirs.

More specifically, Collaborations can be looked at as specific market growth opportunities. For example, connecting our brand with more traditional American sports accounts aids in our US-market growth, while Collaborating with individual players helps connect to their specific home country markets.

It's also a relationship builder. We now know which accounts are open to Collaborating on Instagram with us, and who may be open to expanding our content relationship in the future.

The objective was to use the recent features of Instagram (all individual videos publishing as Reels and the Collaborations feature) to our advantage and push the boundaries on engagement, and reach new audiences.

Our team knew we had an opportunity to expand the reach of the tournament and our brand to new audiences through Collaborations. We strategized about who else could benefit from every piece of content we published, and added that account as a Collaborator. We accepted Collabs from players in our tournament like Rafael Nadal, celebrity fans like Joe Jonas and Oprah, other tennis Grand Slams, and even other sports accounts like the NFL, PGA, ESPN and the Washington Wizards.

Every exceptional highlight, top press moment, quirky fan moment, celeb-sighting and intense player win reaction was published as an Instagram Reel. Videos were fit vertically and utilized on-screen text to authentically provide context for users to instantly be pulled in by the video before they could scroll past it.