PAC-12: SOCIAL PRODUCTION OPTIMIZATION

Challenge

1) A one-size-fits-all approach across social platforms isn't likely the best content creation strategy across every sport, school, and content type

2) How do we extend the capacity of the small social team in how we create design assets for them?

Solution

1) Find out what types of tune-in and content promotions work on which platforms for which sports/teams.

2) Create templates for social media posts and short-form video that enable producers to choose the asset layers for the school and sport they want. So a single tune-in template could be used for any school and sport combo (e.g. Stanford women's soccer, Oregon football, etc.)

Outcome

1) We focused the content in places where they get the most engagement. Women's gymnastics = IG, game-start tune-ins on Twitter and TikTok, "supercut" highlight videos on Twitter and Facebook.

2) At beginning of each season we created several template types (tune-in, highlights, stats, stories) for relevant sports and then didn't have to create one-off assets for those the rest of the quarter. The social team then had everything they needed and didn't need to wait for the design team to respond to requests.

What content performed well, where?

We started with having basic tune-in promotions and other assets and blanket all social platforms with them.

But we learned that certain content types performed particularly well for certain sports on certain platforms.

The most time-sensitive content like tune-ins and in-game and immediate post-game highlights did best on Twitter and TikTok.

Women's gymnastics content got 10X engagement on Instagram that football content did. Game recaps and women's volleyball did particularly well on Facebook. (I can explain more about why if you are interested.)

Additional Priorities

If an event was being televised on Pac-12 Networks the traffic to that event page peaked in the first 10-20 minutes of the event starting. We discovered much of that came from people trying to find out how to watch the game. And tv viewership, whether through a tv set or app, was our most important business metric.

So we created a flow to help people determine if they could watch Pac-12 Networks and have a route to get Pac-12 Networks immediately See: Pac-12 How to Watch.

We also prioritized setting alerts for teams or games. Many users didn't want alerts for higher level categories such as for all football games or all teams for a given school. But the event and team levels were where fans signed up for alerts most often.

Maximizing the value of "Olympic" sports

Many people assume that because college football and men's basketball tend to have the highest general viewership that those event pages would have the highest traffic.

But that's ignoring who else has content related to those events. ESPN and many other sports sites have college football scores, stats, and highlights. Pac-12 fans have many options for Oregon football info.

That's not as true for the so-called Olympic sports like women's gymnastics, softball, wrestling, volleyball. Because there is less content out there -- and Pac-12 has a disproportionately large amount of it for our teams -- these events drew more traffic and engagement than some football games. This was also true on social media.

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