Case Study: Canadian Football League achieves 10x Twitter referrals and 200% social referral growth with Hootsuite

How the CFL used social media to increase fan engagement and referral traffic

The Canadian Football League (CFL) is a national sports brand with nine teams and one of Canada’s biggest annual broadcasts, the Grey Cup. Its Digital Media Team needed to engage fans coast-to-coast around the clock, centralize brand conversations, and scale social efforts to grow loyalty and monetize digital channels.

By using Hootsuite’s shared dashboards and Streams the team consolidated monitoring, scheduled and automated content, and responded to real-time conversations and hashtags. The result: the #CFL was used over 430,000 times (a 28% increase), Twitter referrals to CFL.ca rose 10x year‑over‑year, cumulative social referrals grew nearly 200%, and pages per visit increased 12%, expanding reach and speeding response during big moments.

Canadian Football League

Sean Bell

Director, Digital Assets