North Carolina
Dana Reynolds is Director of Digital and Social Media at the University of North Carolina. She recently answered 3 Questions with INFLCR:
1. Many UNC athletes, particularly in men’s basketball, arrive on campus with significant social-media followings before they ever suit up for the Tar Heels. What are some ways UNC works your athletes to help them be better on social media?
As an athletic department we emphasize that their social media footprint is an extension of themselves. We also teach our student-athletes methods to build and support their personal brands, as well as the pitfalls associated with the improper use of social media. The Carolina brand is unmistakable in the sports world, and signing a letter of intent immediately thrusts our student-athletes into a level of recognition they haven’t seen before. We want to make sure they are well-equipped with the best practices and guidelines to enhance their personal social media footprint, so they can achieve their present and future goals.
2. UNC gets a lot of outside media coverage but also invests significant resources in telling your own story. Could you share a bit about your content strategy?
We strategized to bring the student-athlete experience at Carolina to our audience. That could include giving recruits and fans exclusive looks at brand new facilities and following team personnel on travel days and service projects among other exciting ventures. Our Creative Services staff is tasked with preparing and creating content for all of our 28 varsity teams, which is a large task given the historical success of each of them. We begin each team’s season with a large-scale, multi-station photo and video shoot to capture as much content as possible. We then create a plan to spread content across all platforms in advance of key match-ups, ideas, and storylines we’d like to include on their social media accounts. It’s also very important for us to keep things fluid to allow for organic content to be created and ideated as the season and year progresses.
3. What trend are you seeing on social media that UNC is trying to leverage this fall in your content strategy?
When I began in social media, no teams included student-athletes personal accounts in their content, today it is a necessary component to a successful strategy. We are promoting our student-athletes as influencers and recruiters by providing them with personal content to distribute over their own social media accounts, as well as including/tagging them in as many posts from our verified accounts as possible. Additionally, we give our student-athletes the opportunity to take-over official team social media accounts in order to share their personal Carolina experiences with a wider audience. By showing how personable and impressive our student-athletes are to the public, it helps to galvanize our fanbase, recruits, donors, and the University community to support our teams, and they then want to learn and positively engage more.
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ABOUT INFLCR
INFLCR is a SaaS platform for sports team properties to store, track and deliver their content across their influencer network of athletes, coaches, former athletes, media, etc. Each influencer can access their personalized gallery of content on their INFLCR mobile app, which they can use to download and share specific content to their social media platforms, with all influencer user activity tracked back to an INFLCR dashboard for the sports team properties. In its first year, INFLCR has signed and renewed software subscription partnerships with more than 20 college, high school and professional sports team properties, including iconic college sports team brands like the University of Miami Football and the University of Kentucky Men’s Basketball. For more information or to request a demo, visit http://3.80.10.35/
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INFLCR is the proud content delivery partner of UNC Athletics, providing their creative team with the INFLCR platform to store, track and deliver its content assets through their brand ambassador network of UNC student-athletes, alumni, coaches, etc. to grow the brands of these individuals and the UNC brand.
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