Best Practices Archives - Page 6 of 10

You Don’t Always Have to Play By the Rules

By Guest On December 9, 2014 In Best Practices, Lessons Learned

As a social media manager, I’m sure you are use to questions like this: What is the optimal video length, when is the best time to post, etc.? People love to have data to back up their decisions. And while I love studies and data that can help guide decisions, there is one thing I’ve learned:

Social media studies and analytics that aren’t tied to your team, league or brand are merely just a guide. They aren’t rules to live by. Test and see what works best for your audience. It’s all in the context.

Brad Harrison, the social media manager at Atlanta Motor Speedway, sent me a great example that speaks to this. A few weeks ago the Atlanta Motor Speedway and City of Hampton welcomed big rigs to the city streets for its Hampton Hauler Parade. This year, for the first time, the haulers actually paraded through downtown Hampton. It presented a golden opportunity to get their audience engaged. Here’s how the team decided to cover it on Facebook, according to Harrison:

“When it came to posting a video of the parade, we kept it simple: Instead of limiting the video length to two to three minutes, we opted to run the full length (which was 11:24 long).

By rule, we tend to limit our video’s length. But in this case, we decided that those parameters, while a good rule to follow, at times need flexibility. The move paid off in a large way: NASCAR fans are passionate and posting content where they would see their favorite driver’s transporter resonated strongly.

The post itself had the highest engagements of any post within the past year on our Facebook channel. It had an organic reach of 512,768 and was viewed by 95,136 people (our Facebook page has just more than 113,000 fans currently).”

We all know most studies would say an 11-minute video is way too long for social. In this case though, it worked for AMS.

The lesson is simple here: Pay attention to your fans and what works for you. Industry standards and rules are meant to be broken if you have a grasp on the why.

Do you have any examples of when you broke “the rules” in social and it worked well? If so, share your example below!

As always, thanks for reading!

Snapchat in Social Media + Sports

By Guest On December 5, 2014 In Best Practices, Social Media with 2 Comments

Snapchat came onto the social scene in September 2011, and while it’s been around for quite some time, I’ve neglected it on this blog. I don’t have a problem with Snapchat, I’m just cautious about jumping on a new platform for the sake of doing so. I wanted to take time to understand Snapchat and how consumers use it.

After a couple recent updates though, and stats that are hard to ignore, I decided it was time to take a good, hard look at the platform. Here are the platform stats:

So let’s start at the beginning. If you aren’t familiar with the platform, Snapchat prides itself on being a “fast and easy mobile conversation”. It’s a mobile messaging app where users can take pictures, add their own text and art and then set them to expire in one to 10 seconds.

The app started off without a lot of bells and whistles: Send a photo to a friend that will eventually disappear. It’s easy to understand why it was hard for teams to grasp where they could play on such an intimate (no pun intended, sorry) platform. Since October of 2013 though, Snapchat has been making brand-friendly changes. Let’s walk through some of the changes you should know about:

October 2013- Stories

Snapchat Stories are a way to add Snaps together to create a narrative. Think flipbook. When you add a Snap to your Story, it lives for 24 hours under “Recent Updates” where friends can explore it at their leisure before it disappears. This is the key for brands: Instead of having to send a Snap to every Snapchat friend individually (and spamming them), users and brands can now add a Snap to their Story that lives for 24 hours for their entire Snapchat audience to consume.

Brands and teams can now reach the masses on Snapchat and not worry about one-on-one messaging. This update eliminates tedious work for brands, opens the door for long-form content and allows teams to push out content without annoying their fans (since fans decide if they want to view it). Here’s what a Story looks like from a team:

User-Generated Content Has Its Place in Sports

By Guest On February 19, 2015 In Best Practices with 4 Comments

I recently wrote an article about how social media managers don’t have to take the content journey alone. For many who work in social media, one of the hardest tasks is creating content that adds value 365 days a year. If you work in sports though, thankfully, that is normally NOT the problem: The problem is having too much content.

While I was writing the article though, I naturally kept coming back to how user-generated content could be leveraged in the sports industry. Just like a lot of brands outside of sports, I normally see it used for contests. Quite simply, it’s vastly underutilized.

I think it’s time for teams and leagues to start thinking about how they can integrate consumer-generated content into their regular routine. Let’s start leveraging the power of fans on a regular basis. Here’s why I think it’s important in the sports industry:

It gives you more content, while being cost effective.
It would be great to have an extra hand or two to help us capture content during games and events, but budgets don’t always allow for that. Leveraging user-generated content is a great way to get more content while not dipping into your budget.

It shows a different perspective.
UGC could have a lot of leverage for teams and leagues on game days, providing unique perspective only fans can provide. Your social media team might not have the time to run around from tailgate to tailgate to capture content, but here’s the good news: They don’t have to.

It connects fans even more to the community.
There are a lot of stats out there that demonstrate how consumers trust CGC, and while I don’t think trust is normally an issue in the sports industry, it does help your fans feel more connected to the online community. Additionally, people are more likely to share content they are a part of. Quite simply, it makes your community stronger and is an easy way to thank your fans.

Getting the content.

So are you convinced that user-generated content has value, but not sure exactly what that looks like? Let’s take the first step: How do you source user-generated content beyond contests? There are two key ways to gather user-generated content:

Leverage owned channels.
Soliciting user-generated content on owned channels is common practice in the fashion industry. Many of my favorite brands allow consumers to upload photos of them in the item and leave a review on the product. Free People is a great example of it here.Teams and leagues can replicate this model from the fashion world and solicit user-generated photos on their owned channels year-round. It’s a great way to build a community on owned platforms, while also generating ways to create new content for social media. A win-win!If you want to solicit user-generated content on owned channels year-round, but are afraid it might get stale, think about setting themes of what you are looking for around seasons, sports, themes, etc. Don’t forget to thank your fans and surprise / delight them when they upload content.
Promote what you’re looking for.
You don’t have to run contests just to ask for UGC. Let fans know what type of content you are looking for, give them hashtags to rally around, ask them to leave photos in the comments section of Facebook, etc. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive.

Actively seek it out.
One of the many benefits of social media is the ability to listen, see and engage with your consumers in real-time. Take advantage of this opportunity and set up searches (any and every keyword / hashtag relevant to your team or league) to watch for good user-generated content. When you see something that strikes your fancy, just ask if you can use it. Fans normally say “yes”, and in fact, are honored.

Have the content? Now make it your own.

One of the biggest mistakes made with user-generated content is simply retweeting, regramming, etc. or just uploading ALL the photos to Facebook albums by the masses. If you have permission to the use the content, then make it your own instead.

Take the time to repurpose the photos / videos with your team’s look and feel and craft copy that will appeal to your ENTIRE audience. This is the key to using UGC on a more regular basis and making sure it resonates with your community. Just be sure you always thank and call out the fans that helped to make the post come to life.

But, what does this look like?

Sometimes it helps to have examples to see the possibilities. So, let’s pretend I run social media for the Southeastern Conference. Being a one-person social media team, there is no way that I can be everywhere at once to cover all the schools. This is where user-generated content comes in to help!

In order to leverage it, I would first pick the type of content I’m looking for. How can UGC fit into the story we are trying to tell? While I don’t know the SEC’s objectives and goals across social, one story I believe the conference could tell is tradition.

Since it’s football season, I did a simple search of school’s hashtags or keywords and came across four photos (yes, only four for time’s sake) that highlight traditions in the SEC and created the image below. Obviously more work would need to be done to create the look / feel and thank the fans, but you get the idea (PLEASE NOTE: The graphics below are not from the SEC. I created them for demonstration purposes):

Or, let’s pretend the SEC wants to feature some stadium sunsets:

What if the SEC wants to promote selfies (yeah, sorry):

If you want to think really big, you can use fan-generated video to create a compelling compilation like Baylor Athletics did (thanks for the find, Katie Cavendar) or UCF (the videos from Instagram were saved from InstaSave):

As you can see, the options are endless. Both teams and leagues can leverage user-generated content to tell the story of traditions, fan perspectives, in-stadium experience, view from the student section, spots around campus, selfies with mascots and so much more. Fans are already out there creating great content for teams and leagues: Now it’s up to you to empower them, find it, ask for it and leverage it.

Do you have any great examples of teams and leagues leveraging user-generated content? If so, share them below!