When I tell people I work in social media for a professional sports franchise, I tend to get this question a lot, “That sounds like fun, does that mean that you just sit on Twitter all day?” No. That’s not even close to what it means. Do I always have Twitter open in my browser? Yes. Do I always have separate tab just for our mentions open? Yes. But a social media coordinator/manager’s job goes so much further than that. It’s not just tweeting, it’s the creative process that goes behind those tweets with maximum consumer engagement being at the top of our minds.
Hitting the send button couldn’t be easier and that’s what most people see, but the entire process behind that one tweet is what takes the time and effort in our jobs. It’s about knowing the length of the tweet, the timing of it, how spread out posts are, the thumbnail, etc. All of these are serious things that must be considered if a brand is looking to take their social media platforms to the next level. This is especially true on Twitter as Twitter can be seen as a millennial social media outlet and since most organizations are trying to reach millennials in some way or another, they must make sure that they’re using the platforms and outlets that they’re on.
While there are several components that each organization must focus on, there are a few that really stand out to us in our organization and we tend to put more of our focus into these points of emphasis instead of other ones. For one, we try to put tweets out every 45-60 minutes on non-matchdays as that keeps our consumers engaged but also doesn’t bombard them with content and this shift in strategy has been a big reason as to why we have grown our followers by over 100% since 2015 (Schaefer, 2014). Twitter is unique in the aspect that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for brands to be posting a lot more on there, but it’s also important not to give them too much information or otherwise they’ll stop engaging. On matchdays we tend to post more as we have our normal content, setting the scenes moment, the match and then postmatch content as well. With that we’re not quite as worried about a number of posts because we know people will want to consume that regardless of how many posts there are (assuming it’s good content).
Our second point comes to engaging with our fans. It’s critical to keep Facebook messenger open, the notifications tab on Twitter open as well as opening up any toolbars or apps that will let you know when a fan is engaging with your content. This has been something that we have worked on for years because our overall objective is to let our fans know how much they mean to the organization and the best way to do that is with engagement. We don’t try to do anything too complicated, we just try to work by one of my quotes when it comes to social media, “It’s not about speaking to the fans, it’s about speaking with them.” We want to be that outlet that fans want to come to when it comes to them getting their Rapids contact and the only way to establish that loyalty between fan and club is to have both sides come together to learn a little more about each party. This is a big move because it can oftentimes be uncomfortable, but I can promise that it’s far less overwhelming than not having a job because we weren’t interacting with our fans.
There are far more tips out there, but these are a couple of the ones that stood out to me when I was putting this blog together. We try to focus as much as possible on the fans since they are the ones that will determine whether we have a job for not. But with these two factors plus some of the other ones listed prior in this post, I think it’s fair to say that people in charge of social media definitely do more than just sit around on Twitter all day.
REFERENCES:
Edgecomb, C. (2017). Social Media Marketing: The Importance of a Two-Way Conversation. Retrieved August 11, 2017, from https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/social-media-marketing-the-importance-of-a-two-way-conversation
Schaefer, M. W. (2014). The Tao of Twitter changing your life and business 140 characters at a time. New York: McGraw-Hill Education.