Social Media Monday: How Florida State Covered Their Matchup Against Oklahoma

It's another Monday - time to do a social media breakdown of the weekend's action. The story coming into this weekend's college football games was definitely #1 Oklahoma battling #5 Florida State. If Florida State wins, they become a legit contender for the National Title. If Oklahoma wins, they solidify their ranking. It's early, but this had the makings of a monstrous showdown -- meaning it also had the makings of a social media juggernaut.

As you no doubt know, Oklahoma won in a pretty tight game, 23-13. This is a delicate time and an important time for Florida State. You want to keep momentum rolling, and not let people stop following the team because they lost a tight game against the nation's top team. Instead use it as a moment to reinforce you've arrived in the elite class.

Let's roll. First, let's check out the coverage at Florida State's Facebook page, here. As you'll see first, they did a fantastic job starting this game. It's a simple post of "Let's go!", paired with a shot of the stadium. If you see this right at kickoff, you can almost feel the social media electricity.

You'll also note the "41 Shares" written above. Now, Facebook has introduced another way of interacting with what we post. This "Sharing" functionality means we can share status updates and like them -- sharing them means we can provide a personal recommendation to read a post/see a picture to our friends. This will have a great effect, as friends will see posts as recommended from people they are connected to. Or, said differently, "Like" is passive, "Share" is active. If you're a geek like me, you can read more about this change by Facebook here.

Now, let's look at what happened during/after the game....

As you can see above, the posts are factual - announcing the score after each quarter. The challenge is that anyone can be factual. And Florida State Athletics can't win at that game -- let ESPN win that one! Instead, FSU could offer more personality and more human emotion in their style. Right now, this is a big opportunity, as they leave it with simply a "great effort". I'll come back to this in a minute, but first want to drive over to Twitter in search of more love and energy...

We'll check out Florida State Athletics on Twitter, here.

As you see above, there were no posts in game from this feed.

There is a post right after the game and one right before, but nothing was posted during the game. And the after game the posting style echoes what we saw on Facebook... "Close, but not there yet."

Many of us approach communication in games in the same way. The challenge in front of us all is to tap into the raw emotion of our fan bases. Emotion doesn't have a filter. In a way, I believe Social Media posts around big games should feel like they came out of a locker room (minus certain words, no doubt). Those of us who work in this space must make people believe. When their beliefs are challenged, it becomes our role to reinforce the vision we share for our program.

Seize the moments that happen, immediately, with emotion!

If you're digging this (thanks), don't forget to tune in again. I'll be back Wednesday with more digital best practices. Feel free to follow along via Facebook (here) or Twitter (I'm @andypawlowski, here)

Thanks.

Andy