Being an administrator on the Dixie State College Athletics
Facebook page had its advantages before taking this class. I had a working
knowledge of Facebook, being an avid user of the medium, but applying different
techniques toward a page geared toward the fans of Dixie State sports and the
St. George community resulted in mixed results.
My plan to build an audience through page likes actually
began this summer after attending the CoSIDA (College Sports Information
Directors of America) conference in Florida. One full day was devoted to social
media and how it could promote our athletic brand. So, the wheels were turning
on making the DSC Athletics page better before I ever stepped foot into the
Hazy building this fall.
When I began my first major push, the DSC Athletics page had
roughly 550 likes and very little day-to-day fan interaction. We, as a
collective group of page administrators, decided to add more video and pictures
to the site of summer practices (especially football) to get the student body and
local fans excited about the upcoming season. Just that simple maneuver bumped
up of fan interaction.
Before this summer, we did not actively seek out fans or
“likes”. One easy thing we did was use the “invite friends” link on the right
side of the FB page to reach out to locals and those who have/had been part of
the DSC athletic family. In the first week of asking for like and inviting
people to our page, we gained over 100 new likes.
One further positive step was having one of our admins also
becoming an admin on the main Dixie State College FB page. This allowed us to
place news about our upcoming events on a page with over 7,000 followers. That
extra exposure brought attention to our page as the central FB hub for DSC
sports fans.
But, as you would expect, not everything we tried ended up
with bright rays of sunshine and candy cane-colored rainbows. One major failure
came between a span of October 6-9. Our FB page became more of a glorified RSS
feed with a regurgitation of our website stories, more than a place to
highlight “the story outside of the story”. We lost 9 followers in that period.
One actually sent me an e-mail saying he was leaving because he got nothing new
by being one of our followers. I took that one e-mail very seriously and have worked
diligently since that day to make the DSC Athletics page much more interactive
and exciting.
Did I meet my expectations of having 900-1,000 likes by the end of the semester, no. Did we get the DSC Athletics FB page out into the public, yes! Is this page a work in process, absolutely - and I cannot wait to see how far we can take this portion of our social media plan.
Did I meet my expectations of having 900-1,000 likes by the end of the semester, no. Did we get the DSC Athletics FB page out into the public, yes! Is this page a work in process, absolutely - and I cannot wait to see how far we can take this portion of our social media plan.
There are many new avenues I would like to explore on our FB
page – including polls, flash pages and advertisements. With an upcoming break
from school, I would like to take a good amount of time and refocus our mission
statement and goals to further progress the DSC Athletics page.
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