How Modern Day Fighters Have Had To Become Self-Promoters

How Modern Day Fighters Have Had To Become Self-Promoters

How boxers are promoted in 2018 is almost night and day compared to how they were promoted as recently as the 1990s.

Television, radio and print media were heavily relied upon by promoters to get the word out about their shows and boxers back in the day.

You had to have good relationships with editors in newspapers to get a mention of a boxer or event.

Getting them on TV if they were not already a well-known commodity was like gold dust.

Then a thing called the internet came along and more specifically after that, the advent of social media blew the whole boxing world-wide open.

Due to the amount of content and noise now online it has become imperative that fighters do not just rely on their own promoters to promote them, as irrational as that statement sounds.

They’ve had to get creative and hustle themselves to grow their social media followings, generate traffic to their websites and grow their overall brand online.

While many different social media platforms have taken off in recent years Twitter for some reason when it comes to boxing still seems to be the place where most things happen.

Fighters call one another out on the platform and even sometimes promoters offer fights in public on the platform.

Boxers have had to become consistent every day on their social media platforms and one example of a guy who got to the game early and did it right was Chris Eubank Jr.

While he comes in for some jibes from fellow fighters like George Groves and James DeGale as being “Insta famous” – he’s done a remarkable job in getting himself out their on the platform.

He’s perhaps become the king of training video clips on Instagram which has subsequently grown him a very large following for the stage of his career where he’s at, which has had a knock on effect of growing his overall brand and other social media accounts too.

Like it or love it, trash talk has always been a part of the fight game.

Boxers need to sell tickets for their fights and get the public interested in the narrative, in terms of why should they buy a ticket or tune in to watch a particular bout.

Social media has become the number one way for them to do this and will likely continue to do so for many years to come.