Iowa State Cyclone Hockey – Social Media Update (January 22 – February 6)
Posted on 18. Feb, 2010 by Mike Olaski in Social Accounts
Cyclone Hockey has been through a few great series the past couple of weeks. First, the Cyclones headed to Champagne Illinois to take on the Illini in a CSCHL rematch whom they split. Then it was back to Ames where the Cyclones hosted Eastern Michigan and swept the series with goalie Paul Karus getting his first shut-out as a Cyclone. Finally, the Cyclones headed to Athens, Ohio to face the #1 ranked Bobcats. Unfortunately, the Bobcats bested Iowa State winning both games in the series.
Off the ice, we are getting ready for the Central States Collegiate Hockey League (CSCHL) Tournament in Ames the 19th-21st, where the top 8 teams in the CSCHL will compete for the conference title. During the tournament we will also raffle off a Power Skater from PoweringAthletics, raising money for the Cyclone Hockey program.
These past couple of weeks we have increased our fan base from 1,287 to 1,316 fans, an increase of 29. We focused this past two weeks to make our live Facebook updates for our away series more in-depth and useful for our fans. During our updates we accumulated 25 “likes” from our status updates for the Illini weekend. We feel that it shows that our fan base likes and wants to keep tabs on Cyclone Hockey and we plan on continuing this during the ACHA nationals in March. We are also promoting our Power Skater Raffle which was mentioned on our last update heavily on Facebook to direct them to our “bitly” link to our promotion page in our Blog.
Our Twitter account is doing well as we increased to 133 followers. Our Facebook account is linked with our Twitter account so whenever we update our Facebook account, it automatically updates our Twitter account. This gives multiple benefits, it allows for our fans who do not have a Facebook account to see what we are posting; it also decreases errors in information while posting in multiple locations.
YouTube
Regrettably, our YouTube account has been neglected with our focus on our other accounts but we seek to upload new videos from the Al Murdoch Show, a local television show featuring the coach of Cyclone hockey program Al Murdoch, in order to give our fans a behind the scenes look at the Cyclones.
Flickr
Our Flickr accounts are coming along nicely as we are collecting photos every weekend to upload to our site. We also hope to integrate a running slide show on our new website that is in development right now. Doing this, it will allow fans to check out the team as well as our activities at the game from our Fan Flickr account.
Blogs
Our player blogs have been our biggest focus of the last couple weeks. As we mentioned in our last update, Cyclone Hockey is raffling a Power Skater from PoweringAthletics to raise money for the Cyclone Hockey program. For more information about the PowerSkater raffle, please check out the “Promotions” page on our blog. You do not have to be from Ames, IA to buy raffle tickets, anyone can participate. Tickets can also be purchased online using a credit card here.
In order to promote this we are finding hockey blogs, fan pages, etc. in order to promote our Power Skater online sales. We have created a “Google Document” so everyone on our marketing staff can see what sites have been visited and posted on. That way, we can re-visit each site and see if anyone replied to our posts and follow up in any way we can to encourage sales.
Summary
Overall, we tried to take a more narrowed approach to our social media and some of our accounts suffered in response. This did show us a more detailed view into what our fans like during our games. As we continue to promote our Power Skater Raffle as well as continuing with our game updates, we will improve our other accounts to increase the value to our fans.
