Using Trends to Achieve Your Goals: A Look Inside CSU President Parsons’ and Women’s Basketball Viral Video

Sometimes the success of using a social media trend is all about execution. Learn how the viral video featuring CSU Women's Basketball and President Parsons was executed.

in Trends

Trends are everywhere and ever-changing. How and why brands use trends varies depending on the reason they’re deploying those trends in the first place. For some, they know jumping on trends quickly will lead to higher metric success for their accounts. For others, trends might be used selectively for a particular reason or to achieve a goal. If you have yet to guess, I will be talking about CSU’s Women’s Basketball collaborative video post with President Parsons from this past January. For reference, here’s the video:

What were we trying to achieve?

In late fall 2023, the CSU campus community decided it was time to sell out a Women’s Basketball game since that’s not happened for 25 years. As a top-performing team with top-ranked players, the Women’s Basketball team deserves Moby Madness just as much as any other team. The Jan. 27 game against the San Jose Spartans was selected.

Among other tactics, social media was to play a role in achieving this sellout goal. From the start of this university campaign, we knew that a single inspiring and collaborative piece of content featuring President Parsons and the CSU Women’s Basketball team would support this goal most effectively. And utilizing a video trend ultimately was the best way to go.

What trends did we use?

Jumping on trends is sometimes synonymous with copying someone else’s creative idea with your brand’s own personal twist. Last fall, Portland State created a similar video, where their president joined the school’s football team for practice and ran onto a football field. This is the obvious inspiration for our video. However, even before that, the “Safe and Sound Me Too” trend started on TikTok in late 2021 and gained popularity during the summer of 2023. Despite the trend’s age, we picked it because of its simplicity to produce and knew that we could add special CSU elements to make it successful.

Knowing that we were choosing to use a trend, we made some strategic decisions to make sure our content stood out, including:

  • Choosing a team different from football to feature
  • Asking known campus personalities to be featured (President Parsons and McKenna Hofschild)
  • Proactively collaborating and communicating with all the right people
    • We worked hand-in-hand with multiple Athletics departments to make this happen, including brainstorming multiple trend ideas, aligning schedules, getting President Parsons’ gear ready, and prepping the basketball team
  • Creating an outline that covered the responsibilities of all collaborators and a run of show for filming
    • With only a limited amount of time with President Parsons and other key players, the time we had to film had to be used the most efficiently
  • Using high-quality camera and audio equipment during filming
    • This was a stylistic decision to be different than what usually appears on President Parsons’ channels
  • Posting only a few days before the event for maximum impact on key audience (students, in this case)
  • Adding key accounts as collaborators on Instagram

How did the video perform and support achieving the goal?

There are many reasons why the final video performed so well. The WOW factor of President Parsons putting in the effort to support the initiative, including her acting and multiple outfit changes, is what really got the ball rolling on the performance of this video. When we last checked, across all of President Parsons’ and Colorado State University’s channels, the video had generated around 208,000 impressions and 13,000 engagements and been watched almost 225,000 times. It’s one of the top performing Reels for Colorado State University’s Instagram and is the top post across all of President Parsons’ accounts.

Metrics aside, the video also generated a lot of chatter, both online and in person. At meetings, in classrooms, in passing across campus, and texts between friends, the video was a talking point for many people at CSU for some time. On Instagram alone, it was shared almost 1,400 times. These conversations are important because they demonstrate how social media crossed over into everyday CSU life, and the conversation centered around Women’s Basketball and game.

While there’s no way to know the number of people the video helped get to Moby for the Women’s Basketball game, the game was nonetheless a sellout. The video did help fans get excited about Women’s Basketball, and in the end, that’s what truly matters.

Key takeaways

  • Trends can be tools to achieve your non-social media goals
  • An older trend can be used if it’s executed well or creatively
  • Making the trend your own and finding your WOW element is critical to success
  • Utilizing your available personalities can get people talking about the content
  • Planning and collaborating goes a long way
  • Being purposeful with stylistic decisions can make all the difference in how content performs