The Experience of Managing Live Social Media During a Championship Game

Yesterday I had the awesome opportunity to manage Western Carolina University’s social media during the SoCon Men’s Basketball Championship Game. As a part of the WCU social media team, I updated our official WCU Twitter and WCU Facebook Page throughout the game.

It was a seriously intense game that went into DOUBLE overtime! Our fans were absolutely going crazy… and so was I! WCU ended up trending worldwide on Twitter, as did one of our top players, Harouna Mutombo [even though his name was spelled wrong on Twitter].

 

Five important tips for managing social media during a live event:

1. Keep everyone updated – This was the most important part of our championship game. While the game was on ESPN2, the game was an hour away from my university and not everyone could attend. There were also classes, lectures and other events going on during the game. Our fans were asking for updates and we updated the scores, pictures and more.

 

2. Retweet and talk to fans – WCU fans on Twitter were going insane…. and it wasn’t just WCU fans! We had a lot of supporters from across the nation in various states tweeting about us too. We had the most amount of mentions to the @WCU account I had ever seen and this is my third year managing WCU social media. Since we were getting so many tweets, I wanted to RT a lot of people and comment back to a lot of people thanking them for their support. This also encouraged more tweets, in my opinion.

 

3. Send pictures – As I said above, not everyone could attend this game and not everyone could watch it. For any event, people love pictures and videos are even better. As I also wrote in a previous post, 2012 is *the* year of photo sharing. People love photos and they love updates! The pictures I sent from the WCU account got some of the most retweets of the whole night. Definitely send pictures during any event!

 

4. Build the hype – One of the best things that happened last night was getting our fans PUMPED! We had all kinds of hashtags going. #CatamountNation #WCU #LetsGoCats #WCUforever and more!! We used all the hashtags and a lot of exclamation marks to keep the hype going. I also asked fans to continue to tweet support during the game! This is when we got WCU on the *worldwide trending topics* list with W. Carolina, Western Carolina, Mutumbo and Double OT!

 

5. Follow up, even if you lose or the event doesn’t go well – Unfortunately, we did not win the SoCon Championship, BUT I was not about to let that get us down! Our fans were still SO proud because we honestly played very well and, in all of our hearts, we were the real winners. I tweeted some encouraging tweets after the game… and our fans followed! It’s also important to thank people for attending and for their support as well.

 

Overall, although it was a SUPER stressful game, it was a very fun experience and I had a lot of fun keeping our fans updated and had a lot of fun building some momentum! I hope this post helps you when you have to live tweet during an event.