Two Reasons To Post When Your Athletics Team is Losing

Well, first things first: Howdy y’all! My name is Rachael Caldwell and this is my first post on the #CSUSocial blog. You’re probably thinking “who is this woman, she doesn’t even blog here.”

Long story short, I’ve been here at CSU for about nine months now, as the digital media coordinator for the Athletics Department. It is an incredibly unique position that allows me to not only work directly alongside the communications and marketing departments in Athletics, but work with the sweet team at #CSUSocial and the University to make sure we rep the Rams digitally in the best way possible.

My overall career in sports began back in college, so I’ve been behind the scenes of the game for about half a decade now (sounds more impressive than five years ok).

Unfortunately, one thing that comes with a career in #smsports is that one team has to lose and one team has to win, but either way you have to cover it. With that, let’s look into how when the score isn’t on your side, the content still can be.

There’s two key thoughts behind my approach to continuing to post the good post on Twitter even if a team I’m representing has some very mad online fans.

1. Not every follower is watching the game

2. Your timeline outlives negativity

Global Coverage 

One of the very rad things about social media is that fans are from literally all over the globe, and hey maybe even space because I bet they have Wi-Fi up there. Point being, the people that follow your account are not always at the game or even watching the game!

Shockingly, people have lives outside of watching college sports.

I’ve always thought one of the best ways to understand social and how to best utilize it is to fully consider how you use the platform. If I miss my team’s games, I usually go to the Twitter account to see what went down.

If it was a loss, I still want to see the highlights! I still want to see the scoring plays as I scroll though (prayers there are some). And I definitely still want to see shots of the beautiful stadium, the team, the fans, the atmosphere, and yes THE MASCOT.

The Internet Lives Forever 

As we’ve seen many NFL draft picks learn the hard way, your posts live forever. Screenshots are a thing. So yes, your timeline and posts from the awful loss live on well past the end of doomsday for your squad.

Let’s play a little choose your own adventure: When the scoreline gets ugly you…

– Option A: Throw in the towel, just stop posting.

– Option B: Call the audible, post what you DO have.

You picked option A. Safe bet, nothing to lose there in theory. That being said, if we remember our timeline lives on past the game we can see the argument for Option B. How awful would it be if some internet troll landed on the Twitter account of your team and saw you had just stopped updating things?

Screenshot page with lack of updates. Type: Wow they were so embarrassed by their team’s performance they just stopped posting, even the staff can’t handle how bad this team is. Annnnd hit tweet.

Say we pick Option B. Someone stumbles across our page post loss where we continued to post fun photos of our mascot, cheer, or some very passionate fans that hung around. Maybe they’re in that global group we discussed earlier and missed that scoreline. They may just hit retweet because they LOVE the mascot or they were in that fan photo.

I’d say that’s a smidge bit better than our angry troll friend bringing some firestorm attention to our account.