BoxRec

Obviously social media has had a big impact on how promoters and TV execs receive feedback and conduct research on their shows and the sport in general.

With the rapid growth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, have promoters/execs placed less of an emphasis on boxing forums for market research and idea generation?

I can understand that Twitter & Facebook are the best methods of communication when it comes to marketing and selling to the casual fan market, but what about finding out about what the more hardcore boxing world think? Do they even care and if not, did they ever? Are forums increasingly ignored due to the fact that their views and vibe seem to be more self contained and do not tend to go viral as quickly as more mainstream social media?

Be interested to hear the views on this from anybody who has connections to promoters/execs, either big time ones or even small show promoters.

As for boxers themselves, it seems most have moved from occasional forum appearances to Twitter/Facebook only. Is that all they are interested in too these days? I always thought boxers avoided forums primarily because of abuse but surely they get just as much or more on the likes of Twitter? Or maybe they just prefer a more personalised experience where their social media world can be configured to resolve around them rather than participate as just another member of a forum?

I think the 'hardcore boxing fans' who are still in the spending demographics have, by and large, moved to Twitter and the like. The traffic on here is so slow nowadays and I don't think for one minute that all the slackers who used to post on here have suddenly got their heads down and stopped killing time by chatting boxing.

Those of us dinosaurs that haven't been able to make the shift to Twitter are, more and more, talking to ourselves.