This year, the University of Oklahoma athletics department began ranking the official social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) from FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) schools. These rankings reflect the official pages and feeds for the overall programs – not individuals or individual sports. For instance: OU ranks No. 3 nationally among FBS schools in Twitter fans and No. 6 in number of Facebook fans.
According to Jason Matheson, OU's Director of Internet Services, the staff had never seen any resource like this so they decided to create and maintain one themselves for reference. Matheson writes below about how this service is a great way to keep up with best practices at programs similiar in size to Oklahoma. They update once a month, but might do it more often in the future.
Below, Matheson talks about the OU social media philosophy and provides a message for all athletic communicators: You don’t have to be a big school with deep resources to make social media a valuable tool in your communications strategy. You just have to be creative, efficient and smart in developing your brand.
by Jason Matheson, University of Oklahoma Athletics Director of Internet Services
OU's official FBS social media sites rankings
Facebook and Twitter have emerged as powerful “push” tools for the OU Athletics Department. We always “pull” fans to our official site at SoonerSports.com for information, but now our fans are also inviting us to “push” information to their personal Facebook and Twitter feeds.
This invitation into their personal space online brings a heightened sense of responsibility. We strive to respect our fans by limiting the hard “sells”. We post in a conversational tone and answer individual questions from fans (attacking the “ivory tower” perception that every athletics department battles). We strive to lift the curtain a little higher and bring them closer to our program with unique material. That’s what makes us stand apart from other media. We must leverage our access to our student-athletes and coaches.
When you really think about it, our job boils down to this: make our fans feel like they’re part of something special and – even when they can’t be in Norman – make them feel like they have a front-row seat to the Sooners. That’s how we build and strengthen our fanbase.
We began the national social media page to provide us a resource to quickly locate official pages/feeds for FBS schools. We’re always evaluating best practices and benchmarking our performance against the nation. Ranking the pages/feeds allows us to track and pinpoint schools that are successfully engaging their fans.
From what we’ve seen, you don’t have to be a big school with deep resources to make social media a valuable tool in your communications strategy. You just have to be creative, efficient and smart in developing your brand.