You peer at the footage on your device, squinting to try and make out the chorus of the song. Sure, you could look up the band on YouTube and hear it perfectly, but something about seeing this video sent from your friend at the concert makes it…different, special.There’s no logical explanation for this strange but perfectly normal behavior. But the same thing plays out for sports — a mobile shot from your buddy in the crowd adding a flavor that the official highlight on Twitter simply cannot. There’s a vicarious element to it, that even though you’re not there, you’re living through somebody else — a friend or, increasingly, a team’s social media “host” taking fans along for the ride on IG Stories and TikTok (and, years ago, Snapchat).But the idea of putting a face in front of a club’s social media presence, a guide for the fans, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was a new idea altogether when Aviv Levy Shoshan became the conduit to the club for FC Barcelona fans around the world in 2018.”They were really the first club who made a decision to hire a host, specifically for the Instagram channels, to cover all the first team trainings and also all the first team matches,” said Levy Shoshan, who would become as recognizable to fans as many of the players as the club traveled around the world. “Now you go to any second-tier team, to any random team channel [and] you click on a match day and there will be a guy or a girl hosting on Instagram, which is bizarre thinking about it. But back in the days like five, six years ago, it was not very common. You had the traditional presenter or host for the club TV [content], but not a social host. And now it’s very hard to think away this social figure.”He was a fly on the wall — until he wasn’t. The content became that much better, the experience that much more (here’s that word again) vicarious when the previously backgrounded character became an active participant in the content, the fans enjoying his POV as if it were their own. In hearing Levy Shoshan describe the experience, one can easily close their eyes and picture the kind of content that’s become so common in sports social media today.”I always really liked as raw as possible…It’s just, clicking play and seeing how the players would interact with you,” said Levy Shoshan, who is today the social media host for Dutch club AFC Ajax in addition to leading Double Tap, the agency he founded. “Because at the end of the day, if you are behind the camera, you’re behind the camera, no one needs to know, but once they interact, they interact with your direction. “So we had a lot of times that the players would come up to us or coming out of the parking and walking to the locker room and we would be there just filming and they would just come for a fist bump, you know? And now you see every team in the world [their] social media team is receiving fist bumps from their players. But I think it kind of started somewhere around there. And players also would start realizing like, ‘Yo, if I don’t fist bump [him], there’s no chance he will post me [on social]. So you at some point all 20 players would just walk past you and fist bump you.”That kind of eye contact and second-person (but feels like first-person) interaction is the stuff of magic for fan engagement. But anyone in and around social knows that such participation from players requires trust and doesn’t happen overnight. Levy Shoshan has worked alongside the biggest football players in the world for whom any misstep could blow up. So the best thing the social media person can do is, over time, ensure players know that not only will they be protected in the content, but that it will make them look good. Because social media is a conduit to the fans and by being active participants in the content, a player’s star only shines brighter as fans feel closer and more endeared to them.”I think it all comes down to respect at the end of the day,” said Levy Shoshan. “So what you said at the beginning, they know I make them look good. So there was a good proof of concept.”I was there for a few months, [the players] were all pretty cautious with me at the beginning, like, who is this new guy? What’s he filming? Is he going to post some stupid things? Is he going to make us look bad? [There is] a lot of cursing around the pitch, is he going to pick up on that? Is something going to leak? Then you see after a while that I’m completely clean and always make them look good no matter what, and [they] say, ‘Okay, he’s one of us.'”All of this comes together in remarkable fashion in the rawest of moments on the pitch. Levy Shoshan had the enviable experience of being a pitchside content creator during the World Cup, following Argentina as Leo Messi and La Albiceleste captured the title. He also played an active role when Antoine Griezmann celebrated a goal with a toss of confetti that mimicked LeBron James’s well-known chalk powder toss. As the magic moments compounded, with Levy Shoshan being the eyes and ears for fans at home — their ‘friend’ that just happened to have a great view of the show — the power of this content showed itself to be undeniable. The polished broadcast highlights are great, but they’re just not the same.”Of course you can see the goal on TV, but it’s nicer if you see it from someone filmed by phone, right? It’s because it feels like you filmed it or you interacted with it directly…,” said Levy Shoshan.He continued, describing a dramatic goal at the end of an epic FC Barcelona match: “[So] we’re losing 2-0, make it 2-2, Pique scores in the very dying minutes and he comes to celebrate in front of my face again. So there was screaming, there were these raw emotions that you cannot capture through the camera of a TV.”People want to live it like it’s their own phone, you know, it’s way more relatable than a TV camera.”Maybe we forgot about what makes social media special somewhere along the way. Sure, it’s great that broadcast replays arrive in the timeline in seconds, but that was never the point of what has become this social media industrial complex in the first place. It’s sharing the experience of others, feeling like you’re in their shoes, and having a ‘friend’ that’s there and taking you along for the ride.
LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH AVIV LEVY SHOSHAN
