Arizona Football Delivers Players Through YouTube

YouTube is a critical piece of everyone's social media puzzle. Why? Three reasons hit the top of my mind (with the help of official stats, here. Warning they are pretty mind-blowing!)

1. It's pretty big. As they put it, in a week, users upload the equivalent of 240,000 full length films. Yeah, that's right, in a week.
2. Growth continues to pour in at an alarming rate. 48 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
3. The reach is social -- nearly 17 million people have connected their YouTube account to another social service like Facebook or Twitter.

All that adds up to the fact that you can't forget about YouTube when you look at how your program connects with the world. But it also means you need to really think strategically -- with all that content out there, and only so many hours in the day, having the right content is incredibly critical.

Arizona Football delivers a plan of authentic content into YouTube. Let's check it out!

Hit the Arizona Athletics YouTube Page (here) and you'll immediately see a close up interview with Coach Mike Stoops...

All of the video content is simple, shot with a handheld camera on location. (On the practice field) It's also all incredibly timely -- as you'll see below in this interview with QB Nick Foles. Check out this clip and we'll continue beneath it.....

After watching this video, pieces should start to click. It's not polished (sometimes there's talking in the background, sometimes there's sirens). Which, ironically enough, makes it even more personal feeling. And it means you don't need a professional film crew and beautiful stage to create a connection.

What you do need are access, consistency, and authenticity. These videos come out daily and are shot immediately at practice. (With other players in the background, you can tell they are in the moment that most of the world can't see!) And you get a social potential -- with these videos in YouTube it's easy to share them as I've just done.

How could we make this better? First, Arizona could leverage Facebook a bit more. These videos could publish to YouTube in a Playlist and then debut in Facebook -- during practice. How cool would that be to see a video of practice hit your news feed if you were a recruit thinking about the Wildcats? Second, they could involve the community in selection of content. That might mean ask them for questions... or it might mean to have them choose their interviewee. In any case, there is opportunity to be had if Arizona builds on this model and maximizes its potential inside social channels!!!

That's it for today. But, don't worry, I'll be back with more later this week. Feel free to follow along via Facebook (here) or Twitter (I'm @andypawlowski, here)

Thanks.

Andy