How can we promote the site for the 2018 FIFA World Cup

Question

The 2018 FIFA World Cup in going to start on June 14th, just less than 3 weeks from now. I was curious how the previous World Cup effected the site traffic, after a bit of search I used the queries from this SE meta post to make 2 graphs.

The first one only includes the number of questions asked monthly on Sports SE:

and the other shows the questions, answers, and the deleted questions and answers monthly on Sports SE:

(query for first graph, query for second graph).

There is an unusual spike of questions and answers for February of 2012, but I think that's when the site was introduced as beta, and all existing questions counted for that month. So let's ignore that as an outlier.

From the graphs we can see that the most amount of engagement (questions, and answers) we've got since the site was introduced as a beta is June and July of 2014, while the last World Cup was happening in Brazil. After that, August 2016 (during the Summer Olympics in Brazil) and July 2017 (don't know of a major sporting events) had the most engagement.

The FIFA World Cup is one of the main sporting events in the world and from the above we can see it generates the most engagement which coincidentally should result in traffic for us. So with enough time to prepare for the event, what measures can we take to promote the site?

Answer 1

Maybe creating a separate chatroom for FIFA World Cup could also help? After the World Cup is over, the room can be abandoned.

This room could serve:

• Basically for any discussion and chit-chat related to World Cup. (It seems that it is sometimes mentioned in other chatrooms.) Maybe this would attract some users here - people like to talk about sporting events then watch both during and after the match. And as the side effect, the experience from chat might attract some users to site.
• The room would be suitable also for discussion related to questions/answers about World Cup and football. (Unsurprisingly, we had spate of such questions recently.) This could lead to improving some questions and answers. And, of course, better quality of posts on the site works as a good advertisement for the site and increases likelihood that users come back to the site.

Maybe I should have suggested this sooner. But even if it does not work this time, in the future if there is an event which might catch worldwide attention, we can consider a chatroom specifically for this event.

Luckily, the bug which causes that chat rooms are currently shown in less places then usually does not influence beta sites. So a random visitor of the site might notice the chatroom in the sidebar. And if a user comes to chat and displays all rooms sorted by activity they might notice the room there. (I think that depending on how user gets to chat, either this list of room or list of room associated with a specific site is displayed by default for user who visits chat for the first time. The next time, SE remembers users preferences.)

Answer 2

A good idea would be to share our interesting questions on popular and active reddit threads (which may also lead our users to get Announcer, Booster and Publicist badges), but I personally rarely use reddit and don't know how to find active threads.

Why it's a good option? Well, this is the only instance someone ever got a Publicist badge on our site. I can't find the reddit thread itself, but I'm sure @Michael Myers mentioned that he shared this question on reddit.

So, maybe we can make a list of active and popular reddit threads by sports/some other category, share our questions there and collectively upvote on reddit?

• Some reddit thread
• Some other forum thread
• Something else

Answer 3

Since a lot of people is curious on how the VAR works, I would create a series of canonical posts describing how it works. I see we currently have Use of Video Assistant Review (VAR) in FIFA World Cup 2018, it may benefit from some expanding.

Also, it is good to count on how the Hot Network Questions formula works: (see the formula here) the more votes, the better; the earlier they come, the better. Within the 6 first hours of a question, it should be curated and answered, since this is the proxy time we have. From that moment on, its hotness will go down. So it is a great moment to remember about Vote early, vote often!. This way, we will attract users from other sites in the Stack Exchange network.