Then, we'll finish the week out by looking into the 12 member institutions and elevating the best digital features I've uncovered.
You can stay plugged into this journey via this blog, via the Digital Hoops Blast Facebook page (linked here) or on Twitter -- I'm @pawlow34.
Let's start.
Social Media Exposure
The journey always 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 does mean exposure to ways to follow the conference.
Social Media Roster Depth
Clicking on either the Facebook or Twitter icon and you come to the image below... where Twitter is the clear priority. You'll see three ways to follow the conference on Twitter, which we'll check out now.
The SEC Sports main Twitter feed is here, with 20,538 followers. I think it's even more impressive to see that they are a part of 959 Twitter lists. They are pretty active (over 4,500 tweets now) and do a nice job in hashtagging #SEC to their posts.
SEC Hoops is on Twitter, here, with 4,219 followers. They do a solid job here, sharing updates on alums and current players on SEC properties and on other sites. It's worth a follow if you're into SEC basketball.
The SEC then packages academics and community service through the Twitter site, MoreSEConds, here, with 201 followers. Cool idea, but not solid execution. They've been really inactive here, with no posts since last November.
Putting some numbers to this....
- 4.6% of the time that a fan subscribes to the main SEC feed, they put the conference into a list. With the SEC basketball feed, this rises to 5.3%.
- The Twitter equivalent of student-to-teacher ratio: Tweets per Subscriber. The conference has tweeted just over 4500 times -- or 0.22 per subscriber.
- Activity is inconsistent. There's a personality and a tone to their coverage, but they range from very active on the SEC Sports Twitter site to nonexistent in the More SEConds Twitter site.
How could they be better?
Consider merging the More SEConds and SECsports accounts together. Then work together across the main SEC site, the SEC hoops site, and conference sites -- through use of a common hashtag (#SEC or #SECBB?) and retweeting each other.
Let's turn next to the SEC on Facebook, here, with 71,500 fans. (That's quite a total). Their wall is pretty active, sharing updates and recent postings on the conference and conducting trivia contests to their active fans.
I was impressed to see the SEC leverage the Events tab, allowing fans to join a "Guest List" for any of their Championships. (Link here)
Buzz.
To gauge buzz, I did a quick search for #SEC on Twitter. There were 60 mentions in the past 5 hours, along with 3 references to the government feeds. In fact 4-5 of those 60 mentions were related to the government -- meaning that hashtag to own might be #SECBB.... Still, a lot of energy here!
Intangibles
Synergy. I'm looking for the total impact the conference has across social media to be higher because the pieces work well together. In this case we need it badly as these pieces are great but need to work together. I see this as an opportunity area for the conference and one that could be delivered via the SEC Sports Twitter account if they can position it as the heartbeat of everything.
Report Card
Strengths: Twitter. Buzz
Weaknesses: Intangibles, Exposure
Neutral: Facebook, Depth of Roster.
That's it for now... But come back tomorrow as we start elevating the 3 best practices I found through the 12 SEC member schools!
Andy
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment