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by Chelsey Chamberlain, LSU Assistant Communications Director/CoSIDA New Media Committee, cchamberlain@lsu.edu
and Shawn Medeiros, Endicott Sports Information Director/CoSIDA New Media Committee, smedeiro@endicott.edu
PRE-PLANNING
What makes your institution unique? This first step can seem overwhelming, but the key here is to find a few ideas that can promote YOUR school in the best way possible. What is it that makes the university, college or student-athletes stand out to the audiences that you have? What is YOUR story? It doesn’t have to be a list of 20 things, but a list that tells your story and is consistent with what you have. You don’t have to put out content that looks exactly like another school(s). You want this content to be unique to your institution and tells the institution’s story consistently with what has already been done throughout the academic year. Maybe you pick one or two ideas to showcase throughout the summer. But the PLANNING starts in May or early June.
When planning, the easiest way to start is to create a content calendar. Once you have the topics or ideas you are considering to showcase over the course of the two-to-three month span, you can put the ideas on paper or in today’s world an excel or calendar document. The content can be spread out weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Pick what content you feel is necessary to your schedule. This works for just one team or it can work for an athletic department social account (depends on the angle you are taking).
Examples:
- Alumni series - once a month (depending on how much content is collected in the process).
- Highlighting student-athlete internships (what are they doing over the summer?) or post-graduate job placement– That could be weekly or bi-weekly with the content that is collected and the time that it takes to create the content.
- Throwback Thursdays – this is weekly content and I highly suggest starting this. In mine and Shawn’s experience, this content really engages fans and showcases the history of the athletic programs.
- Campus content – this is a perfect time to get out of the office and on campus. Show off what the campus has to offer. This is helpful for recruit and what coach doesn’t like a little help with recruiting?
- List-themed content – could be anything from top wins, top moments, most-engaging social posts, or even a rundown on your social posts throughout the year.
- Study-abroad trips or summer trips – Could be of your coaches and/or student-athletes.
A good way to start the content calendar is to count how many weeks you have in the summer (schools differ with fall sports starting and spring sports ending) and really figure out how to best amplify your content throughout the time you have allowed.
Below is an example of a content calendar. This was created by a graduate assistant at LSU, Alissa Cavaretta (#GAlissa). She created this to organize her content throughout the LSU Baseball season. As you can see this is helpful in strategizing her content, keeping it organized and scheduling content to get ahead of the game.
DAY-TO-DAY OPERATION
With all of this, you are probably asking yourself, “Well, when will the random awards, schedules or fall preseason content come into play”? Once again, the key to all of this is to find one, two or three things that can help you stay relevant over the summer without creating too much extra work or cutting into the regular day-to-day posts.
The random summer awards, schedule releases and all of that will still be popping up throughout the summer. Get ahead of the game on those deadlines. Ask your coaches when the schedules will be ready so you can plan that and insert it into the calendar. There are always going to be last minute projects that will pop up, but that’s not going to hurt your content calendar or your summer content. There is always something popping up at random times in our profession as we are always on our toes.
EXECUTION
Everyone loves the execution portion of social media. It’s pretty simple to understand why we enjoy the instant gratification of the profession. However, if there’s one thing Chelsey and I can’t stress enough in this article, it’s the pre-planning, as it goes a long way to bringing your social campaign(s) to the next level.
Before we get into tracking your future summer campaign(s), let’s dig into the data about when to post on each platform.
At Endicott, we have a few simple rules to live by that have helped increased are social numbers in all facets over the last few years.
- Each platform must have a different voice. For us, our platforms are Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
- Understand what audience is on each platform (will be discussed below).
- Be cognizant of when you are posting, and how frequently.
- We try to abide by a 3-hour spacing rule on Facebook and Instagram.
- Facebook and Instagram can’t go more than one day without a post.
- Meanwhile, for Twitter we post organically and/or retweet applicable content to our channel every day.
- Consistency in the above philosophies has continued to develop our growth on all platforms.
TWITTER
IMO, I believe Instagram gives its users better analytical tools for free over Twitter, unless you’re willing to pay for it.
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t test things out and see what sticks.
By clicking your Twitter avatar, you can access the analytics hub and advance through to the audiences section. Here, you will find top interests for your audience, demographics, and much more. Try and use this data to dictate some of the features you may want to run in the summer.
In regards to when to post, experiment with your tweets leading up to your summer content. Over the last three years, we have gained a better understanding about when to post by mixing it up a little. Here’s what we have found.
- Our most important content gets posted between 9 AM and 10 AM and later on at 9 PM and 10 PM.
- Sometimes 3-5 PM does well enough, but based on our findings the above bullet point works the best for us.
- Our campaign driven content will then be pinned, and later compounded with 2-4 tweets that push back to the original content (this does not include retweets, quote tweets, and comments that we interact with).
- If we are having a lot of interaction on a particular topic for the day we make sure we don’t go over an hour without some type of content related to the original post. Otherwise, we space it out closer to the 3-hour rule like Facebook and Instagram.
An example of this that has worked for us is our Gameday Tweets. In the past, we posted a tweet about every game that was being played that day. Our timeline became flooded, and by a quick look at the analytics it was clear it wasn’t working for the metrics we were trying to achieve with them.
So, after some long discussions and inspecting the data a little further, we decided to move to one tweet a day that encapsulated as many games as it could. We also attached some form of media to the tweet (GIF with student-athlete(s), video, or photo), added some funny/intriguing copy, and always linked to our composite schedule at the bottom of the tweet. We then stuck to that format for every post, made sure to post at 9 AM as best as we could, and later pinned the tweet for the entire day up until the conclusion of the last contest that day. Once we started doing this we immediately started to see gains in engagement over a variety of metrics.
This is one example of how we decided to change our viewpoints on when to post and how to post.
INSTAGRAM
This analytics hub couldn’t be better. To access it, switch your team account to a business profile and reap the benefits two-fold. You can find everything from what hour(s) and day(s) your followers are on most, to where your metrics like impressions, engagement, and reach stack up for each post and so on.
To keep ourselves in tune to the data each week, either someone on our staff (primarily myself) or a work study student will track the posts and input them into an excel sheet. Before posting, we also make sure to communicate as a staff what works best on each day(s) and only post at those times. By mapping out post times with staff members we never double post at the same time – which decreases your reach given the latest update to the algorithm.
For example, all of our conference Player of the Week awards come out on Monday’s – much like most of the rest of the country. We know that on Monday’s the peak times for our Instagram followers are 12 PM and 9 PM. With that being said, that’s when we will post our weekly award winners. We don’t ever want to feel in a race to publish but more so in a position to post when it makes the most sense.
FACEBOOK
The same principles apply here as they do for Twitter and Instagram. By accessing the insights tab and going to posts, we know that 9 AM and 6-9 PM are our best times to post. We make sure to stay as consistent as possible with this on Facebook.
That’s really the key here. Start posting with consistency and see where the data takes you. As for your summer campaign(s) have some fun with it.
An example of one of my favorite Endicott summer campaigns was #EverydayEndicott. For this campaign, we would post a scenic campus photo to Instagram once a week – not on a particular day – but at the peak of when our followers were on the platform. Our goal was to make our followers connect with our beautiful campus, use Instagram for what really works on the platform – beautiful/artsy photos – and stay away from “athletic” driven content in the summer.
This example also segues greatly into tracking.
TRACKING
How do you know your posts are working? That’s what we are all trying to figure out here, right…
Well, it all starts with setting your measurable goals FIRST then tracking them.
For the Instagram project mentioned above, we wanted to do one simple thing – drive up our average likes per post from the previous year. We had two things working for us in this thought process. From the 2015-16 academic year to the 2016-17 academic year we wanted to have a less is more/quality over quantity philosophy.
Thanks to the #bestnine feature, we knew we could track this quite easily. We simply took the total posts number and divided by likes to determine our average. This helped us track our summer content campaign but also gave us another benchmark for future content.
In the 2015-16 academic year our total posts number was 894 and our average likes total was 160 (142, 844). Meanwhile, the 2016-17 academic year saw a dip (on purpose) in total posts (670) and an increase in likes and average (188,395 / 282). We also were able to connect the dots that this type of content worked well in both academic years as that it was showcased on the #bestnine feature during both years.
Other examples of data tracking include our previously mentioned Gameday Tweets initiative where we saw an increase in click-throughs to our composite schedule, and engagement. Both of those were goals with that initiative.
So, whatever summer campaign(s) you create this summer – an Instagram initiative, alumnae/i features, study abroad content, internship/job placement articles, connecting the ideals of your college/university to your content (I’m starting to run out of ideas here) – make sure you set some measurables to it and go from there. If you can compare it to other content / dig up what previous averages for prior campaigns were that will go a long way as well.