Twitter for the Small(er) Guys

My last post on Twitter this week is an answer to a question from another e-buddy, Jay Stancil at Union College. Jay (like Zack Lassiter) also writes a blog I follow--his is called The Master Juggler. He also hosts a weekly chat on Twitter for sports information directors at #SIDChat on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. Eastern. You should join in. Through people like Jay and Zack, I have found that we SIDs can learn a lot from each other (well, Zack is a marketing guy but that's ok). Folllow Jay on Twitter at "UC_SID".

Jay asked a question I can relate to: Is there much of a need for a small sports info office to have multiple twitter accounts? He and another person manage 23 athletic programs and he was wondering if you have a feed for, say, football, should you have a feed for everything. This question I can answer without any research because I'm only going to speak from experience.

I am an SID at a D-I school with only 17 programs. There are three of us and we are swamped. We do our own media guides, run the website and do all the events. I can't imagine what the workload of two people running 23 programs must be like. But my answer,Jay, is an emphatic "no."

Sometimes I think we feel pressure from other schools, even those our size, to develop a culture we can't really keep up with. I know we are not Duke. We aren't even Colorado (I still can't believe they are in the Pac-whatever now). But when I look at dukeblueplanet, I envy. Then, I snap back to reality.

I can tell you what works for us and we are good with it. I manage one Twitter feed-"msubobcats." That is our department feed. We have a game day feed we can all use called "bobcatgameday" that we tweet events from so we don't clutter the Twitterverse. But, our department "sponsors" 6 other Twitter feeds. They are managed by coaches and other staffers. I keep an eye on these feeds (follow them all) and occasionally ask them to retweet dept. news, but I don't maintain them in any sense.

All our social media account managers will soon be taking training (according to our new social media policy)to be accredited account managers. It isn't training really, just an overview of the department policy and then a sign-off on the policy. I will maintain a list of all our social media sites with administrative passwords in case of an emergency. Other than that, I am not involved in each program's personal branding.

We're going to have a couple sessions on personal branding at CoSIDA in July and I think this is a great topic to explore. Heck no--I am not going to manage 23 Twitter feeds. One is enough.

And Jay--to your other question about keeping people engaged, especially during the summer, I have one answer: editorial calendar. This has been my life saver. I actually use my Outlook because there's no way I'll ever fill up all those 40-plus half-hour slots on there. I make a list (at  coaches' meetings and at staff meetings) of topics and tweets people in-house want to see, then I schedule them on my Outlook. Now using tools like Socialoomph, you can write those ahead of time and schedule them. I see on TweetDeck's newest version, they now have a scheduler as well. I use it--it saves me a lot of time and worry about remembering to tweet. We have tons of camps and golf tournaments over the summer so we have some content. I also schedule tweets of upcoming fall events and news about schedules, what student-athletes and coaches are doing, pics from camps--it just takes some organization. And as busy as people can get with 23 programs, an editorial calendar might be a handy tool.

Thanks for all the great questions. I sure would like to hear some feedback about keeping people engaged on Twitter in the summer. I need help there myself. BTW--I am going to post this as a discussion on LinkedIn as well.