Essay Example on Montana Grizzlies: A Successful Football Club Since 1963

Introduction

The Montana Grizzlies Football Team is one of my favorite football clubs based in Missoula, Montana. The Montana Grizzlies club represents the University of Montana in college football in Division I Football Championship Subdivision. It is commonly referred to as Griz and has been a key figure in the competition (Big Sky Conference) since 1963. It is worth noting that it is a founding member of the competition. Montana Grizzlies has been a successful team since the establishment of the championships. The massive success of the club has attracted a considerable fan base and followership over the years.

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Current State of Social Media Presence

Social media is currently one of the most engaging tools used by the club to gain a mass following. The team uses social media to interact with their fans and marketing themselves. A majority of the teams and individuals have social media accounts which they use to make relevant announcements directly to the fan base. The club is present in almost all the popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, amongst other sites. The team uses social media to engage actively and interact with fans, announce the team activities, and endorse brands.

The Montana Grizzlies Football Team has successfully managed to keep the fans engaged throughout twitter, which is the most active. The club makes at least a post daily, which might be either a reading accompanied by images or links or videos. Such contents are likely to put the fans active on social media such that they are eager to read receive new content daily. The channel that needs the most improvement if Facebook. Facebook has more than 45,000 likes, but a post would attract less than ten comments and shares. The club has not been engaging fans in the team activities such as creating interactive conversations between the fans and even the club. For example, it has omitted the voting for the man of the match, prediction of scores, and even the line ups for upcoming games.

There are hundreds of media houses and online news sportspeople who have gained a vast following due to their active roles in readers' engagement. For example, some of the sporting activities which have received a huge following due to social media include Loyola-Chicago for the 2018 NCAA Basketball Tournament, the Houston Astros for the 2017 World Series, and Chloe Kim from the 2018 Winter Olympics. Chloe Kim became the youngest woman to ever win the Olympic snowboarding gold medal in 2018 (Graham, 2018). Consequently, she received the massive following from social media, and she has more than 68k followers on Facebook and significant followers on other social media platforms.

Brand Voice on Social Media

The overall tone of the club in the social media accounts demonstrates uniformity in attitudes, values, and selection of words of the club addressed to the target audience. The voice constitutes how the brand personality extends to an external audience. The contents posted on all the social media platforms exhibit a friendly and inviting tone. The friendly tone seeks to create the comfort of the fans by communicating professionally and enticingly to promote their stay in the club. The inviting aspect seeks to create a bigger fan base for the club since football teams earn massively from the support received from the fans through the sale of tickets. Currently, the club has more than 45,000 fans on Facebook and 36,000 on twitter.

The team has done averagely to engage fans through the established social media platforms for various reasons. For example, it has not been receiving significant comments and shares on their media posts regardless of the attractive massive online following. The brand voice is well-executed, although several challenges are also notable in the content; for instance, texts and images are the most dominant contents in the social media pages. The online engagement enables the club to showcase its unique brand personality and identity and build a meaningful connection that would result in a repetitive reading of the posts made.

Previous social media coverage of games, players, and staff

The team plays home games on the campus stadium, Washington-Grizzly Stadium, located in Missoula. The arena has an average stadium of around 25,000, the leading attendance in the competition. The club experienced successful spells from 1986 to 2011. The team has been successful over the years to hold several records; most playoff appearances in a row (17), overall playoff appearances (19) and Big Sky Conference titles in a row (12).

An evaluation of the social media accounts of the Montana Grizzlies Football Team revealed the contents, brand voice, and engagement of the club with the public. The content of the posts related to the marketing of the club, where it uses the platforms to highlight the clubs' achievements and strides made to improve the quality of all the aspects. The content also includes the announcements of the club's activities, such as the matches ahead. Other announcements made include the signings of players and interviews with key players who contribute to the massive success of the club.

Best Practices Opportunities

The social media administrators of the team have an opportunity of exploiting the available tools and strategies to achieve public engagement and participation of the activities. Researchers have offered diverse strategies and technological tools that could be used to create exciting, inclusive, and engaging content to reach more consumers. Some of the proposed measures include focusing on platforms with most consumers, the latest technologies, and including appealing content mainly for young people (Culnan, McHugh, & Zubillaga, 2010). Such recommendations could be applied to improve the engagement and content of the posts made by the club on social media platforms.

Proposed game plan

Grizzlies will be playing against Grand Canyon at 9: 00 am on 1st Feb 2020 based on the data fed in its website. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram appear to be the most effective and suitable channels to post all the upcoming events. I would recommend several suggestions that would improve the content, brand voice, and engagement of the posts made on these three platforms. The club should focus on social media engagement with fans. For instance, although most of the social media platforms allow viewers to share the content, owners of the pages can increase engagement through shares and comments. Fans want to interact with teams directly, and therefore, the admins of the pages should make an effort to respond to the concerns or comments of the fans on the post.

Another way of increasing engagement is to ask fans to possibly predict the potential lineups for the next games or even choosing the player of the match. This exercise should be conducted 12 hours before the game time since the fans would be aware of the available players for selection. Most of the teams should have awards for the man of the match or the player of the month in which fans should directly participate through polls. The club should improve on the quality of content. For example, a majority of the posts on social media include writings and images. The inclusion of short videos for either past events would be a way of improving content.

Date Platform Time Content

01/02/2020 (9:00 am) Facebook 9:00 pm (31/01/2019) A short video, prediction of scores

Twitter 9:00 pm (31/01/2019) GIF videos, highlights of previous meetings

Instagram 9:00 pm (31/01/2019) Instagram story, an illustration of club legends in the game

Measurement and Metrics

The measurement of the content and engagement will be measured by the number of audiences that reads, views, comments, or reacts to the posts. A higher audience means that the fanbase has been more engaged and reached by a post made on social media, while a low audience means a lack of engagement. These would be measured by the number of people that reacts to a post through comments, views, and reads. Additionally, the reactions should be positive sentiments rather than negative.

References

Culnan, M. J., McHugh, P. J., & Zubillaga, J. I. (2010). How large US companies can use Twitter and other social media to gain business value. MIS Quarterly Executive, 9(4).

Graham, B. A. (2018). Chloe Kim isn't just a gold medalist: she's a transcendent star. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/feb/13/chloe-kim-gold-medal-snowboard-halfpipe-winter-olympics

Montana Grizzlies (n.d). Retrieved from https://gogriz.com/sports/football/roster