For the first time in history, the Women's Six Nations has a title partner (aka main sponsor) - social media giants, TikTok. Having signed a contract deal at the start of the year it didn’t take long for the promotional support to kick in to drive the growth of audience engagement for women's rugby. With the popular app signing up, this was the start of something spectacular for women’s sport. The buzz leading up to the competition and during it was immense. When the tournament opened, England secured their 19th-straight test win in front of a new Scottish record crowd of 3,988. This year we saw England lift the TikTok Women’s Six Nations trophy, but this Six Nations was definitely one to remember for all participants!

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For the second-year in a row, the competition was running on a separate calendar to the men's, but crucially for the first time, every single fixture would be broadcast live in all participating countries. BBC Two, BBC Red Button, and BBC iPlayer had all the games live for rugby fans.  Whilst we watched the TikTok Women’s Six Nations unfold, we were lucky enough to be a part of such a historic event. Having the opportunity to create content, edit and post on the Women’s Six Nations TikTok account was a blast. The official Women’s Six Nation TikTok account now has over 80,000 followers and 1.2 million likes.  Here’s what we contributed…

Overall (with still a few videos left to go live) we have delivered over 350,000 views and 18,000 likes for our #RoadToSixNations campaign. Our two best performing videos were “Fantasy Rugby Advice” and “50:22 explained”, two pieces of content that educated the audience without speaking down to them. Kicking us off, we first started by putting together a collection of ‘Meet The Captains’ videos from the launch event of the Women’s Six Nations. The mini series included asking them questions about how they got into rugby, their rugby idol growing up, how excited they are for the first game, player to watch out for and most importantly what rugby player from their team should we follow on TikTok!  As the games started we created short-formed videos of highlights from each round of Six Nations starting from round 1 all the way up to the final round 5. Tries of the game, national anthems and anything topical that happened during each game also featured on the TikTok account. Keeping the followers updated whilst also promoting women's rugby was vital during this campaign. 

Ref Explains was another fantastic couple of edits we pulled together with the amazing Scottish Women’s referee Hollie Davidson. Hollie helped us explain to the audience the two new laws brought into the game of rugby, the 50:22 and the goal line drop-out. Using footage from both the men and the women’s tournaments, we explained the rules clearly and concisely, with one viewer commenting, “I saw that happen in the 6 Nations and didn’t get why they kept possession. Thanks for educating 😊” and another commented “When Hollie talks you listen 💥🔥🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿”

Another great piece we worked on was ‘A Day In The Life’ following around Ashleigh Wilmot who was the stadium presenter at the England VS Wales game. Ashleigh was able to film lots of behind the scenes footage for us which we were able to put together to showcase what a fantastic day she had!  We were able to give viewers a sneak peak of what it is really like not only being a female stadium presenter, but also what it's like on a Women’s Six Nations rugby day! We were able to share with viewers inside a TV truck, player's thoughts on the game and crowd reactions. This game also had a record attendance of 14,689 fans in Kingsholm, a record for a women's rugby match in England. 

Finally, we wrapped up our time collaborating with the Women’s Six Nations by covering highlights of the competition and announcing the player of the tournament. We all had so much fun taking part in the TikTok Women’s Six Nations and seeing the women's game grow over the past 6 weeks. We can’t wait to see how far it goes! All things mentioned can be found on @womenssixnations on TikTok.

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