Before Kris Jenkins’ last-second shot had even swished through the net, sinking my Tar Heels’ national title hopes, I was over it — at least from a fan’s point of view. My favorite sports teams have suffered too many heartbreaking losses over the years for me to spend too much time languishing in defeat.
Plus, I had work to do – work that was important to many fellow fans. So I stood up from my seat in the media risers at NRG Stadium, gathered my belongings amidst the falling confetti and began to tap out a tweet on my phone to @UNC’s 61,000 followers that expressed our pride in the Tar Heel basketball team.
Incredible game. Incredible season. Thank you, @UNC_Basketball, for all that and more. You make #UNC so incredibly proud #GoHeels
— UNC-Chapel Hill (@UNC) April 5, 2016
It was a muted end to our Final Four coverage and, obviously, not the one for which we had hoped. And for that reason — the fact that our content and social media plan now had several pages of ideas that wouldn’t be realized — I spent the better part of a week moping about what might have been. We had so much awesome stuff ready to post if the final buzzer signaled a Carolina victory that we weren’t able to share.
But that doesn’t make us any less thrilled with what we were able to achieve along the way.
The social media team at UNC-Chapel Hill is only a little more than a year old. It consists of three folks: our social media director, Natalie Vizuete, and two social media community leaders, Deseré Cross and myself. We’re part of a larger department that also features a content team (a photographer, two videographers and two multimedia content producers), an internal relations team, a media relations team, a creative services group and other communications specialists who help tell Carolina’s stories. Fortunately for us, everyone within our department understands the value of social media as well as the magnitude of the NCAA Tournament stage. That meant everyone was willing to help us conceive and execute a coverage plan that, if nothing else, we felt certainly would’ve won the Final Four of social media.
Our planning began months ago when it became clear the 2015-2016 Tar Heels basketball team would be a title contender. As a former journalist who’s covered a few NCAA Tournaments, I started making mental checklists of all the fan-focused flavor our platforms could deliver to our followers while dreaming of gifs, graphics and videos that would proclaim Carolina as national champions.
A few days before the Big Dance started, a couple of us on the content and social media teams put some ideas on paper. Not long after the Tar Heels locked up an Elite Eight win on a Sunday night and sealed their trip to the Final Four, our boss gave me approval to head to Houston. And that’s when our cross-department effort really kicked in to overdrive.
On Tuesday, our entire working group brainstormed a plan that would comprehensively cover everything in Houston and on the home front in Chapel Hill during the Final Four. The next day, a smaller group of us met with our Athletics Department’s social media team and video producers, as well as reps from our alumni association and booster club, who’d be hosting events at the tournament. This helped us coordinate coverage plans so we wouldn’t duplicate efforts. Our job was to focus on the fan experience, while our athletics accounts focused on the players and the games.
By Wednesday afternoon, we had a day-by-day, platform-by-platform plan that spanned from the basketball team sendoff from Chapel Hill that evening through a potential welcome home party for the team the following Tuesday. Our agenda included media pitches, like the wildly successful and widely published b-roll and photos of the lambs that our live mascot Rameses had welcomed into the world that very week. The plan also listed what I was expected to cover and produce in Houston, what Deseré would capture during campus viewing parties and how Natalie would engage with fans online and share content from our newsroom.
We also staffed up the night of the National Championship game. Two communicators on campus helped Natalie monitor social media traffic and engage one-on-one with our fans on social platforms. The Carolina photographer, videographers and writer turned around their content fast enough for us to publish in-game videos and photo galleries that captured the excitement on campus. (These were a social media smash hit, by the way.) Overall, we had more than a dozen people place a huge emphasis on social media — a welcome boost for our team of three!
Was the extra work worth it? We think so. Here are the numbers:
- We posted about a dozen videos of varying length — some shot on iPhone and some produced by our videographers — that combined for 560,000 views over six days across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. We didn’t post each video on each platform, but we did see something stunning across each channel: we had view completion rates that ranged from 30 percent to even 100 percent on some of these videos!
- We produced our first Facebook Live videos, including two sendoffs from the basketball team’s hotel in Houston and an interview with UNC basketball alumnus and Turner Sports analyst Kenny Smith. There were more than 40,000 live viewers across the three videos, almost 100,000 video views in total for the trio and thousands of reactions, shares, post clicks and comments.
- For the week the Final Four dominated our Twitter feed, we saw 2.4 million impressions. For context, the entire month of January on Twitter drove 2.9 million impressions for us. Our Twitter engagement rate spiked and we saw 8,000 retweets and 16,000 tweet likes over the course of the week. For the last 28 days as a whole, our impressions are up 73 percent, our profile visits are up 88 percent, our mentions are up 56 percent and we’ve added thousands of followers.
- Our Instagram engagement rate increased to nearly 11 percent, good enough to top the Iconosquare education index for several days and place us among the top 20 brands overall that Iconosquare tracks. (We’re normally in the top 10 of the education index).
- We changed our Twitter profile picture to our snapcode and saw thousands of new Snapchat followers. Our snapstory views nearly doubled – and in the 10 days since the championship game, it seems those viewers have stuck around.
A couple more quick lessons: with so many people working toward a common cause, group texts became unwieldy and unreliable. GroupMe proved a great alternative. Also, because Snapchat allows only one sign-in per account at a time we had to be very intentional about scheduling who would use the app at any given time — and flexible when someone needed quick access.
All in all, the lessons we learned left us feeling like winners, no matter who was cutting down the nets. But we’re eager for the Tar Heels to take another crack at the Final Four because we’re already drawing up new plays and ideas.