The document discusses KUSports.com's social media strategy and results from promoting their coverage of the 2010 Big 12 basketball tournament. It found their Facebook fans and Twitter followers grew significantly during this period. Their hashtag #kubball saw a large increase in usage. Overall, their social media presence helped drive more traffic and interactions to their website during this major sports event. The document concludes by discussing opportunities to expand their social media strategy to other events and how to balance sponsored content with news coverage.
13. @KUSports is No. 1 Twitter account for KU basketball
14. LJWorld & KUSports are No. 1 mainstream news sources*Influence data from Radian6 The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
15. Three full days on-site promoting KUSports.com & social media. The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
27. Generated 32 fan photosThe World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
28. facebook.com/kusportsdotcom Goal: 623 new fans Time: 32 days Need: 20 fans/day 3/13: 3,312 Total Needed: 160 Total Achieved: 200 6.4% increase! 3/5: 3,112 The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
35. Photos Posted: 29 The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
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38. 2009 Big 12: 772109% increase! The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
39. twitter.com/KUSports Goal: 965 new fans Time: 32 days Need: 30 fans/day Total Needed: 240 Total Achieved: 220 3/13: 5,045 Goal missed 3/5: 4,825 The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
78. How much will our audience take?Paid content must have value to our audience! The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
79. Done. The World Company | www.ljworld.com | socialmedia@ljworld.com | @WorldCoSocial
Notas del editor
Combined on-sight, online and social media in one placeIncluded all three groups of people
KUSports.com analytics date back to 1998, but our social media data is barely a year old.
Three daily social media prizes, but thousands of followers and hashtag uses. Most of the people who won didn’t know we were holding a contest.Our competitor, KU Athletics, does not @ mention or interact with fans. We provide that encouragement and appreciation to our fans.
To grow our Facebook community by 20% in a month, we needed to gain 20 fans a day. By the end of the Big 12 tournament we needed 160 new fans to stay on track. We easily achieved that goal without any giveaways or promotions (a violation of FB TOS). By the halfway mark, we were over half way to our goal.
To set a benchmark for interactions, we just let it happen to see what fans would naturally do. Interactions over the Big 12 Tournament week jumped 99% and were up nearly 300% for the first week of the NCAA Tournament. Once post-season is over, we’ll average those days out and aim to increase that by 20% in 2011.
The media consumption is a newer tool to Facebook insights. According to this tool, we had zero photo views, video plays or audio plays during the 2009 tournament… so anything was an improvement. We posted 34 pieces of content ourselves that ended up with 473 views or plays. Traditionally KUSports.com photo galleries are extremely popular, so throughout the NCAA Tournament we’ve been replicating the same game photo galleries on our FB page to good results. Video plays were more successful when they were not promotional content from us, but stuck to game and player analysis.
The amount of traffic on KUSports.com is huge for a niche site. Last year we had over 66 million page views, so we know that social media will never be a major contributor, but we can grow referrals as much as possible. So it’s encouraging to see our weekly average of referrals is up over 100% this year thus far, and our actual tournament referrals are up 353%. A lot of this can be attributed to the growth of Facebook in 2009, but our effort on social media has increased, too. Additionally, uniques visitors to KUSports.com jumped a bit – however it appears that most of our fans on Facebook are already loyal site visitors. Audience loyalty is important on Facebook. If that number decreases next year, we aren’t doing something right. Overall we’re please with our Facebook growth, but we think we can do more with content now that we can monitor video plays and photo galleries. In fact, we’ll be offering content sponsorships and themes to potential sponsors/advertisers coming this football season.
Twitter is tougher. We’re still growing, but not as quickly as we’d like. We need about 30 new followers a day and we’re averaging 27.7. In order to make our goal, I think we’ll be relying on KU to make a Final Four or national title run in this year’s tournament… because the better the Jayhawks do, the better we do.
The hashtag that we created is #kubball, and it’s the primary tag we use in our tweets. From time to time we’ll add in others like #big12 or #sherroncollins. This graph shows the use of the #kubballhashtag from the start of conference play on. The late season boost is astonishing – especially on senior night, which, to date, is still the highest amount of #kubball uses we’ve seen. We encourage hashtag use because we put a TweetGrid on our home page during games, so anyone who uses it will show up on KUSports.com. We also used that same TweetGrid on a giant monitor at our tent at the Big 12 Tournament. That attracted attention and led to some Twitter follows and sign ups.