Below are three helpful guides to optimizing your gameday strategy as a one-person shop, including building gameday graphics, scheduling posts and rethinking Instagram.
Despite what parents, student-athletes and fans may think, graphics don’t just appear on a timeline out of thin air. That responsibility falls on your shoulders, oh mighty SID. You must take up this mantle with great haste, for you have a basketball doubleheader tonight and baseball season starts on Sunday.
In reality, most one-person shops don’t have a design team to rely on. Time is of the essence and priorities have to be set. It’s up to you to decide where graphics fall on that list, but it is certainly possible to design, schedule and post quality graphics without bogging down your schedule.
Gameday Graphics
by Blake Childers – Berry College, Director of Sports Information & Promotions bchilders@berry.edu
CoSIDA New Media Committee Member
Gameday Template Walkthrough:
However you want your gameday graphics to look, the important thing is to create your template so that it is easily edited. You can see on this template that there are only a few layers that are unlocked. Don’t reinvent the wheel each week.
When you go to update a graphic, first drop in a new action shot over the “IMAGE” shape layer. Right click the action shot to create a clipping mask.
Use the shortcut “ALT” on PC or “OPTION” on Mac.
From there, update any logos and text including date, time, location. You can also add different types of content to your graphics. For example, if your basketball team has a radio broadcast coming up, throw the radio station on there.
Designing the template itself will take the most time, but is great summer work. Once you get used to updating your template each week, it could take less than an hour if you keep it simple.
Scheduling Posts Using Hootsuite
by Brian Clinard – Spalding University, Director of Athletic Communications bclinard@spalding.edu
CoSIDA New Media Committee Member
We use Hootsuite to schedule game day social media posts for Twitter and Instagram. Below are the steps to login and schedule a post on Hootsuite.
1. Go to
https://hootsuite.com
2. Create an account (first time user) or login (existing user)
3. Once logged in, go to your dashboard (red arrow).
4. Once you access your dashboard, go to the top left corner of the screen, select the account(s) (red arrow), and begin to create you post.
5. Once you have selected the account, create the post in the white text box (red arrow). If there is one drawback to creating a post on Hootsuite, it is the inability to select an emoji in Hootsuite. However, you can work around it by creating a post template in Twitter, saving it as a draft in Hootsuite and copy/pasting into the text box for each post. Once you have the text portion of your post knocked out. You also have the option to attach an image/video. To attach media you click the little paperclip (green arrow) on the lower right side of the text box, select choose files to upload, and choose the file from your computer that you want to post.
6. Once you have created your post you can either select blue “Send Now” button (red arrow) to immediately send the post to the selected account(s). Another option is to click the calendar icon (green arrow) to schedule the post for a later time and/or date.
7. To schedule a post you: Click the calendar icon, select the date and time (red arrows), the click the blue “Schedule” box (green arrow) to finalize and schedule the post.
Gameday on Instagram
by Kyle Piercy – Centre College, Director of Athletics Communications & Digital Media kyle.piercy@centre.edu
CoSIDA New Media Committee Member
The Platform:
Instagram offers a few different options for one-man shop departments looking to create unique gameday content.
Repurposing your Twitter graphic for Instagram is a quick and easy “two birds” approach -- but PLEASE remember to tap the arrows in the bottom left corner to make your design fit if it is not a square! For landscape designs, Instagram recommends 1080 px x 566 px. For portrait, go with 1080px x 1350 px.
This year, however, I have started using the Instagram
story feed for my gameday graphics,
not the timeline. One big reason for this is because Instagram does not populate the feed in an exact chronological order, and I don’t want a gameday graphic from days ago to appear on the top of my feed. Also, since my gameday graphics are simple and relatively uniform, I don’t want to fill my profile with dozens of similar looking designs. Anything you post to your story disappears after 24 hours.
Since the story is always “portrait,” it’s important to use a graphic that has a dimension similar to the size of a cell phone screen. Don’t be the person that jams a landscape picture onto the story. Although I have the iPhone X, I stick with a common 1080px x 1920px graphic.
Some Tips:
Once your graphic is made, you’ll need to transfer it to your cell phone. If you’re an Apple user all the way then AirDrop is by far the easiest and quickest way to drop the image onto your mobile device. If it’s in your “Favorites” section on Finder (and it should be), just click and drag the graphic to hover over AirDrop. Once the Finder window switches to AirDrop, drop the image onto your iPhone. Make sure both devices are set to send and receive.
If you aren’t Apple-based on both ends, there are numerous ways to share files between devices. I have typically emailed the image to myself and saved it to my phone.
To post to your story, simply open Instagram, tap on the camera in the upper left corner, swipe up for most recent pictures, select your image, add any unique text/gifs/etc. if you want, select ‘send to,’ send to ‘your story.’