Pro Sports Team Social Media Plan (Columbia Locomotives, Fictional AHL Team)

Please note: I created and wrote the following components of a social media plan for a final course project (JOUR 399: Social Media for Sports Media) at the University of South Carolina during the spring 2021 semester. This was developed for the Columbia Locomotives, a fictional American Hockey League expansion team. If you would to view the full project as a PDF file, please click here.

Audience Analysis:

We have identified two people we believe are representative of the types of people we want to target our team’s social media efforts toward:

1: Ashley Jacobs

Ashley, a UofSC third-year criminal justice major, is from Newark, NJ. She loves to hang out with friends, and there is a new adventure for their friend group every weekend. Rarely do their activities involve sports (really only during Gamecocks football season from the looks of her Instagram), but they are truly a social bunch. Ashley loves football season because of the opportunities to meet up with friends before, during and after games. She might not always be able to tell you who won the game, but she will be able to tell you who she was with and if they had a good time. We first came across Ashley when she tweeted, “Number one perk of being a @UofSC student is getting free swag. I think I’ve picked up ten new T-shirts on Greene Street this week #winning”. During our analysis of her Instagram, we observed that she posted a series of pictures for her dad on Father’s Dad, with one of them showing him wearing a New Jersey Devils cap. She seems decently familiar with hockey since an NHL team is located in her hometown, but she is no die-hard fan and almost certainly will not be getting Locomotives season tickets. But it is not a stretch that we can get her to come to at least seven or eight games between her fall and spring semesters because she is always looking for fun things to do with friends.

For Ashley and other people who are similar to her, Instagram and Twitter are the best avenues to reach them. We will need visually-driven posts and memes to stand out. As we build Locomotives brand awareness toward the “Ashley’s” of the area, we recognize the benefits of including promotional messaging on our Twitter and Instagram. We were already thinking of doing Dollar Hot Dog Nights for Wednesday home games, so we will run with this and post it on Twitter right before the season starts as we think this will appeal to the college student demographic who may not have a ton of cash to spend but still want to enjoy their friends’ company at fun places around Columbia. Lastly, we will absolutely make an effort to write friendly comments on Instagram photos people like Ashley post on Instagram and tag our team on.

2: Rafael Martinez

Rafael is a high school history teacher from Lexington, SC. He grew up in Spartanburg and is a 1997 graduate of Clemson University. He does not strike us as a die-hard or even casual hockey fan initially, but we can conclude from his Facebook page that he is a single dad with two daughters. He posts a series of pictures of him and his daughters at the South Carolina/Clemson football game every year, a family tradition. This suggests that the three of them are decently into sports, but above all it seems the primary thing they desire to do together is spend valuable family time in an entertaining environment.

Rafael has 54 Facebook friends and every single picture he has posted shows him and at least one of his daughters. They are a tight-knit family, so to appeal to Rafael and other Facebook users like him, you better believe we will have family-focused content on our page. Therefore, relevant content we will post to cater to them includes announcements for Dollar Dog Night (themed event) at the arena for two home games this season and for a promotion in which on the first home game every month we will offer a free ice cream dessert to fans who purchase a large fountain drink. We will also upload Happy Mother’s Day and Happy Father’s Day posts which will feature photos of a series of moms and dads smiling with their children, all wearing Locomotives apparel at the arena and throughout Columbia in general.

Sample Posts

Post #1: Twitter

As mentioned in the overview, the overarching goal of our team’s social media efforts is creating new connected fans by increasing social media engagement, and this tweet serves as a prime example of our team’s engagement and responsiveness. We acknowledged the potential we had to build a bigger connection with this fan given what she wrote in her post, and by responding to her we are hoping to get her and more fans like her even more excited about the team. On top of that, we are indirectly encouraging other fans to mention us or directly communicate with us on social media since they see that good things can come out of it. Long term, we hope offering the complimentary tickets in this example gets us a favorable reputation, builds awareness, gains more followers, shows fans that our social media channels are not just one-way forms of media, and connects us to the community. And ultimately, we hope making posts like this sells more tickets for our home games in Colonial Life Arena.

Post #2: Twitter

This tweet has more to do with our new star player’s personal life than it does hockey, and we are perfectly content with that as every post does not need to appeal solely to die-hard hockey fans. This post will be effective because it draws back the curtain of Johnson and gives the audience a better sense of him as a person and as someone more relatable than they may have thought. Johnson does not wear shoulder pads, a helmet, a jersey and ice skates all the time. He gets excited about moving into a new home — a big moment for anybody even if they happen to be our team’s most popular player who has over 100,000 followers on social media. We are humanizing our top player here and establishing a sense of community pride by physically showing him becoming part of the geographic area.

Additionally, we took this opportunity to refer fans to our account on a different platform and specifically mentioned the what, where, when, and why to drive engagement to our Instagram, too. We are making it clear we encourage fan participation in the Q & A and value their engagement with us. We are offering our fans the ability to get acclimated with their team’s top player while he gets acclimated to his new community and the fan base at the same time.

Post #3: Facebook

In our fourth module lecture, “Audience”, we learned about sending different types of content to different audiences of varying demographics and preferences depending on the platform. As Professor Hull touched on during the video content lesson, a Carolina Panthers TikTok video is very different and targeted to a specific audience compared to a video that would be shared on the Panthers’ Facebook page. In the video within the sample post here, our head coach talking about his career as a coach is similar to the Panthers coach Matt Rhule going into detail about the organization in the team’s Facebook video.

Therefore, our video is targeted toward Facebook users as we are appealing to fans who would enjoy hearing directly from the team’s coach to get a sense of his career insight and hockey knowledge. We are not showing any sharply edited game action highlights here, combining several pics/videos into one video with background music playing like a team would do for a Tik Tok post, or providing a funny behind-the-scenes moment that would likely do better on Instagram. We believe this post will be effective as it stays true to a few simple things common on Facebook: A visual, concise text, and a call to action to click the link and watch the video of the press conference. And we agree — our head coach does look strikingly similar to our new star player.

Post #4: Instagram

Social media accounts serve multiple purposes just as the posts featured on them can be multifaceted. This post captures our social media team tapping into the influencer effect that NBA social media manager Jenny Fischer talked about during her guest lecture. Obviously, A’ja Wilson is a prominent member of the Columbia community and a household name throughout South Carolina — and increasingly the entire country as she racks up accolades in the WNBA. Similarly, this post follows the inclusivity strategy by bringing awareness to social issues regarding the importance of players in the WNBA, or female athletes in general. Following A’ja’s quote attribution with “2020 WNBA MVP and 2017 NCAA National Champion” only reiterates to our audience that this is a huge figure in the sports world here who is raving about hockey and is someone they can expect to pop out to our team’s games whenever she is back in town.

Also, the quote included in our graphic shows people who might not be the biggest hockey fans in the world that they might want to see what happens if they check out a game. We know hockey might be a bit low on the totem pole in terms of sports South Carolinians are most familiar with. But we think showing how much of a hockey fan A’ja has grown into after going to a Vegas Golden Knights (a recent expansion hockey team themselves in a geographic area without a traditional hockey audience) will help boost excitement and appeal to people who might not be die-hard fans. A’ja surely did not disappoint Gamecock women’s basketball fans with her play on the court, so they will most likely trust she would not let them down here.

Post #5: Instagram

This Instagram post will be effective because it will stand out from other posts on a user’s timeline given the photo’s subject and the various colors shown in the photo from a beautiful day in Columbia. We also kept the caption short and sweet, even including a train pun related to our team name and brand. Since Instagram is a visually-driven platform and not the place for a wall of text, we made the photo of Alex exercising the primary focus of the post.

In the early going, Alex Johnson is the only player we have to promote given he is the only player currently on the roster. While we will upload a variety of posts with different subjects and purposes for each, we view Alex as an ideal way for us to draw traffic to our page given his own substantial number of social media followers and status as one of the best players in the league. Please note that our star player is also wearing Locomotives team colors, which he was happy to do to subtly help us continue to establish the team’s brand identity on social media.