The America East Conference's Social Media Footprint

Today we'll continue our look into the America East Conference. We will review their social media presence -- what they do and where they could improve. And I'll plot it all in one spot on a Social Media Report Card.

Then, we'll finish the week out by looking into the 9 member institutions and elevating the best digital features I've uncovered.

As a reminder, you can follow along in this journey with me via Twitter. I'm @pawlow34.

Let's start.

Social Media Exposure

The journey begins with the conference's weight to social media. There are always stories, teams, and schools weighing in for home page worthiness. But the question I start with is... how easy is it to follow the conference? That doesn't necessarily mean quantity of places. But it starts with how proud the conference is of what they have in front of them.

The America East gives us home page access, and they do this in the form of a good sized banner (shown below). But, to find the social media platforms available, you need to navigate to the left hand side, scroll down, and wait for the button below to change out....

Social Media Roster Depth

America East hits us with three places to connect -- YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The Facebook page is very strong. Linked here, the conference has 770 fans.

But it's not just the number of fans, it's what you do with them. And the conference does a couple of things we can all steal and apply.

They list their member institutions as Favorite Pages. Shown below, it gives a pretty good vibe to see a conference elevating the membership as "favorites". This shows a subtle love between the conference and the schools that leaves a good impression.

They foster personality and engagement. See below, for a contrast of two ways that they do this. One, they ask what your favorite moment in the last school year was. I'm a fan of voting and polls as it takes no time to do, yet it connects you to others by voting. And it gives the conference a little look into the opinion of their fan base along the way!

Then, you'll note the comment below. They elevate Adam Sandler, a New Hampshire native, who reps the conference by wearing gear in the movie from 4 member schools. Nice!

Both of these are great starting points that could be made deeper by allowing fan comments or images (in the voting) and by showing us images of the movie. But the interaction is dead on.


The YouTube page, here, is a potential star because they deliver great content to fans (or recruits) that is just tough to find elsewhere. In analyzing this further, I found that they have only 37 subscribers against 9,065 channel views -- meaning of the fans who view the YouTube page, only 0.4% subscribe to have these delivered to them.

Why is this? My first stop is content. Is it any good? And, in this case, the answer is yes. It's good content that's tough to find elsewhere. I love their America East on Campus feature -- which is a made for TV program that documents the league at snapshots in time. It covers all sports, all schools. They leverage experts (TV personality Frank Sullivan previewed the conference basketball tourney).

As we dive deeper into other conferences, we will compare this. But for now, I would focus on areas to make this better.

1. Enable fans to subscribe for the sport of their choosing. The page here requires me to sign up for everything. (And I only want men's basketball, for example)
2. Find an expert for each sport (or topic) to build around. Love the idea of using TV personalities, but you can pick current or former student athletes, conference personnel, or even superfans.
3. Make it easy to get this content away from YouTube. Pump this video into the website, and Facebook page.
4. Develop a schedule. Let me know what I'm getting, and when it is coming. It doesn't have to be an overwhelming TV Guide. Just set expectations.

I say all this because I love what the America East has going for it and this could be incredible.

On Twitter (linked here, shown below), the conference has 500 followers and is listed 51 times. I look at a couple of numbers to help gauge activity.

1. 10.2% of the time that a fan subscribes, they put the conference into a list -- nice!
2. The Twitter equivalent of student-to-teacher ratio: Tweets per Subscriber. The conference has tweeted 1,633 times -- or 3.3 per subscriber.

Finally, on the qualitative side, the conference does a nice job of retweeting posts by their member institutions.

Buzz.

To gauge buzz, I did a quick search for @americaeast on Twitter. There have been 7 mentions over the past week -- not a bad start that could be grown by encouraging member institutions to reference the conference where possible!

Intangibles

Synergy. I'm looking for the total impact the conference has across social media to be higher because the pieces work well together. I see this as an opportunity to expand the viewership of the video content from YouTube while also adding in more fan activity on Facebook. Could fans participate in the stories that are created?

Report Card

Strengths: Fan Engagement, Depth of Roster

Weaknesses: Exposure, Buzz

Neutral: Intangibles

Hope you enjoyed this tour! Come back tomorrow as we start elevating best practices in the America East!

Andy