Athletic Content Creation for Social Media Platforms
John Swanson
Creating sports content for cycling
In the interest of exploring the algorithm for sports content on Instagram I created @cycling.clips (which can be found on TikTok as well). I got a lot of good feedback from analytics when performing this. Creating non-meme format content related to a sport that was fairly slow paced had its challenges.
How to begin?
First things first, beginning this process wasn't planned, which I think attributed to the success I found. There wasn't any peering over my own shoulder overthinking alternatives to every clip I added.
How did reels do?
Isolating to Instagram would be silly. When publishing content I used TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to track analytics. It seemed there were some standouts among the content types I made, and some that just didn't stimulate the algorithm at all.
Instagram preferred the short punchy intros and videos that typically featured descending.
TikTok liked the edits that told a story, but YouTube liked them even more.
YouTube preferred opening up with crashes, which as a cyclist, wasn't my favorite to go through and clickbait with.
That said: I averaged 500+ views, with some outliers being 2k+ views and 160 views on Instagram.
On YouTube the same exact shorts achieved a much higher average and peak view count average almost 2,000 views and peaking at a 5,000 views.
TikTok performed closer to Instagram, but averaged closer to 1,000 views. The content preference was short, story focused, edits about certain cyclists.
Conclusion:
Content generation plays a huge part in exposure, but focusing on platform specific algorithms are even more important. According to the data I found, it seems that athletics aren't a bad representation, but perform astoundingly on YouTube.
How can you use this for your business?
The most important question! When creating this content remember what each platform loves. Instagram likes memes and quick punchy short format reels. TikTok likes longer more story driven, but still attention grabbing, content. And YouTube likes sudden, straightforward, and story driven content that can be of any length.
Remember to use both long form and short form avenues of content delivery for YouTube!
Where can I keep up with this project?
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cycling.clips/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@blind.creative (This includes more personal projects)
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Posted Jun 24, 2025
Created cycling content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, analyzing platform-specific algorithms.
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Mar 17, 2025 - Ongoing
