Iowa State Cyclone Hockey – Social Media (Nov 20th – Dec 4th)
Posted on 09. Dec, 2009 by cyclonehockey in Social Accounts
The Cyclones faced some strong opponents in the past couple of weeks as they headed into the Thanksgiving weekend. First, heading to Arizona State University to face the Sun Devils whom we split; then headed north of the border to the University of Manitoba where the Bison swept the Cyclones. With these two weekend series, it posed a couple of interesting questions. How do you promote two consecutive series that are away? How does the absence of home games affect our social media? These questions are key in our decisions and new developing strategies.
Our Facebook numbers are looking better than ever increasing our fan base every day. From the past two weeks we have increased our fans from 912 fans to 968 fans, an increase of 56 fans. We also had some breakthroughs that we are really excited about. During the Sun Devil series we started posting game updates through Facebook. On those game updates, we found that our fans are reacting to these posts by commenting on the post and liking the post as well. On a single post, we found two comments and 11 likes; our best reaction to a post since the application of our fan page. By receiving comments and “likes” on our posts we get added publicity. Each comment or “like” gets recorded on the fan’s “wall” for every friend that they have to see friends of the fan could possibly become fans themselves.
For our away series we also advertised on our fan page that our game for the Arizona State series would be broadcast on our TeamLine (online play-by-play) as well as on FASTHOCKEY (a televised webcast of the game). We do not know how many fans tuned in to each broadcast, but we were able to see that one fan did comment about the post; showing that these services are ones that we want to continue.
Our Twitter account saw improvement over the last couple of weeks, but not as much as we wanted to see. From our last update we grew from 101 followers to 110 followers; whether or not this was a direct impact from our lack of home series or another factor we will continue to monitor this closely. We are also using our “@ mentions” to support other sports here at Iowa State University; the effect of these at mentions on our fan base is unknown but we feel that it can only help in the long run.
You Tube
Unfortunately, our video has not changed from last updates count of 15, but our viewer ship is up 360 video views. This is a decrease from last updates increase however we are trying to change that. We hope to upload later this week and will let our fans know through our Facebook fan page.
Flickr
Every strategy is not always a good one as we found out over the last couple of weeks. A while ago we held a photo contest for our fans to boost ratings for our Flickr page. We have not received a fan submission yet and it does not seem like we are going to be receiving any in the future. We are going to find a way to incorporate this into a different strategy.
Blogs
We spent the last couple of weeks improving our blog site with minor adjustments to make it more functional. Even when found that fans were still visiting our numerous blog entries. In one day there was 67 new views which increased our viewership to 144 and blog view to 3,623. Once we finish updating our blogs we will continue to publish new entries.
Summary
Overall, we found that even though having two consecutive away series slowed our progress, it did not stop it. Social Media is such that it is versatile as long as the methods are constantly improving and problems fixed quickly. With two back-to-back home series this month, we will have to think up new strategies for our remaining games to get our fans more involved in all aspects of Cyclone Hockey.
