Strava Clubs vs. Traditional Social Media

With its athlete-specific audience, Strava club content resonates more than mainstream social media, and are the perfect platform for long-term community growth on Strava.

Clubs are a key part of the Strava experience, and each post is inserted into the athlete’s feed. "Building an audience via a Strava club shouldn’t be seen as yet another administrative burden," says Gary Roethenbaugh, Managing Director of MultiSport Research. "Consistently, we found that posts on Strava clubs had greater interaction than that generated via traditional social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter."

Strava club members are engaged endurance athletes and represent a highly targeted audience. Between Q4 2018 and Q4 2021, Strava clubs saw audience growth of +279%, double that of most other mainstream social media channels

Unlike traditional social media, where brands typically pay to boost the reach of posts, post-interaction on Strava clubs is organic. A variety of posts may work well – from asking a question, to generating comments and including photos. Generally, a higher frequency of posts will boost engagement rates.

Athletes are positive. Encouraging and motivating content tends to have the highest engagement and resonance with the Strava audience.

Post-interaction shows the average amount of interactions – reactions (e.g. likes, etc.), comments and shares – per member, per post.

The Clubs Opportunity for Brands

Post with greater frequency

Strava clubs are currently under-utilized by many brands across the sports landscape. As a social network specifically for active people, Strava is not as over-saturated as other social platforms, which cater to a multitude of user interests.

Across the many traditional social media channels, there is much more competition for share of voice. Here, a post’s resonance will typically be shorter lived in a user’s feed. Whereas, a post on a Strava club may have greater longevity than those on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter in particular.

Those Strava clubs with sponsored integrations are witnessing 3x the level of engagement compared to the average of all clubs analyzed. Clubs with integrations have higher club member numbers, higher posts per day and notably higher post interaction.

Challenges are also a great way to grow club membership. During Q4 2021, challenges on Strava helped to boost a number of clubs. Clubs running challenges have above average: club member numbers, engagement, post interaction, weekly growth and posts per day. For example,  brands activating via Strava challenges witnessed 1.5x the level of weekly audience growth compared to brands that didn't.

Learn from other successful clubs

Athletes can choose from over 750,000 clubs on Strava. Below are some examples of the biggest and best performing to date.

The top 9 largest brand clubs on Strava are: Le Col, Rapha, lululemon, ROKA, Zwift, New Balance, Shimano, HOKA, and GCN

About the study

All data in this report covers Q4 2021 (Oct 1 to Dec 31, 2021), a key period that included Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the Christmas Holidays. 100 Strava clubs were selected for the analysis. These clubs were verified as being administered by endurance sport brands – ranging from apparel, to accessories, coaching, events, media, nutrition and retail.
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Each brand’s own Strava club was compared with the brand’s own performance on traditional social media. The Endurance Sport Social Analytics (ESSA) data prepared by MultiSport Research was used as a source for tracking traditional social media.