Fan Engagement in 2025: What Strava can teach sport about UGC

When consumers can turn their own data into content, you don’t have to force the story; they’ll tell it better than you can.

Earlier this year, Strava rolled out a transparent Instagram Stories sticker. Two taps, and your run/ride/swim stats appear as a clean overlay, distance, elevation, time, ready to drop on any photo or video.

It’s blowing up because it’s:

• Hyper-personal: exact data, pulled in real time

• Frictionless: two taps from activity to post

• Status signalling: proof of commitment, achievement, and belonging

• Platform-native but brand-owned: looks made for Instagram, created in Strava’s ecosystem
  

  What can sport organisations learn from this?

  You already have this level of data, ticketing history, participation records, membership milestones, but in sport, it’s almost always used for strategic decision-making, not storytelling. And worse, most of your fans and participants never even see their own stats. Consumers love milestones, totals, and personal bests, yet that information often sits locked in back-end systems, invisible to the very people it’s about.
  
  Strava’s play works because it’s both shareability and strategy. The overlays give users something they want to post, but the real power is in the data model behind it. To get the overlay, you need the Strava app, driving downloads and active users. Every share pushes the brand into new networks. Every activity fuels Strava’s first-party data and product stickiness.
  
  Sport could use the same approach: milestone overlays as an in-app feature that drive downloads, capture rich first-party data, open up commercial integration opportunities, and allow you to measure how far fan stories travel and link it back to sales.
  
  Imagine as a consumer, opening your team’s app after a match and seeing “53rd game at Eden Park”, “65,244 minutes watched live”, “22 wins witnessed”, “1,350km travelled this season”, “12 tackles made”, “2 line breaks”, or “100 metres gained”, all ready as a transparent sticker to drop over your match photo or post-game shot in the sheds on your Instagram story. Instantly personal, proudly branded, and perfect for the humble brag, while quietly driving app sign-ups, growing your database, and extending the moment into every fan’s network.

  The numbers tell us it works

• UGC posts on social media generate 50% more engagement than branded posts. (The Shelf, 2025)

• 79% of consumers say UGC highly impacts purchasing decisions (Tint, 2024)

• 59% of consumers are more likely to share content if it’s personalised to them (Nosto, Consumer Content Report 2021)
  

  Strava didn’t run a campaign. They built a feature that turned data into shareable storytelling, drove app usage, and grew their first-party data.
  
  If sport built that capability inside their own apps, it could be an always-on storytelling engine, powered by the fans themselves.