The Challenges for College Athletics Social Media Strategy and How USC Athletics Manages to Fight On Across Sports

Consider how daunting the social media operation is for a college athletics program. A couple dozen sports or more, multiplied by however many platforms, all unified under a single brand and trying to reach and engage a diversity of demos and age ranges of fans, donors, and recruits while the roster of athletes turns over every few years.

I mean, where does one even begin?

There's no template to follow and there are different structures across schools, each with its different resources and set of programs. But they're all facing those challenges noted above, with the complexities of NIL and realignment only increasing in recent years with no signs of abatement.

Jordan Moore has been there for all of it. Moore, who leads social media for one of the country's most storied institutions, the University of Southern California (USC), was there for the early days — before Instagram existed, let alone TikTok and Snapchat. Platforms, staff sizes, and needs grew, which necessitated a new way to organize content production for the Trojans. There was too much communication needed, and too many demands that a constant conveyor built couldn't hope to sustain with high standards in the long term. So Moore and his team changed things up in recent years to maximize alignment and collaboration.

“What we've done here over the last couple years and how things have changed, we went from what I would call a production-based model to an individual sport model," said Moore who has been with USC Athletics since 2010 and is also an undergrad alumnus of the school. "The way it used to be, we were like a production house, so you would say like, 'Oh, hey, we need a lacrosse video' and then it would just go in through the video team and somebody would do it, and spit it back out. And then the next time you need a lacrosse video, somebody else would do it.

"What we've changed now in the sort of individual sport model, teams, pods, whatever you want to call it — every single sport knows who their social media person is, who their SID is, who their graphic designer is, who their video person is, so you have that little mini team within your larger creative team. Those groups are meeting and they're coming up with their content calendars and their ideas, and they're working hand in hand with the coaching staffs and the players, and so what you create is not just having SIDs embedded in programs, but everybody is."

A college athletics program is the sum of parts creating a powerful collective whole. Each team is comprised of countless stories, each student-athlete a source of inspiration for fans to glom on to. Breaking records and winning championships are always a welcomed avenue for engagement, but, just like in team sports, it's the human stories that drive the strongest connections. So while the official, catch-all USC Athletics social accounts serve as a 'central hub' for all the happenings of USC sports, celebrating the big wins and conference titles, Moore and his team know the path to fans' hearts comes from fostering connections with the humans at the heart of it all, the student-athletes wearing Trojans colors.

"On the individual sport accounts we're really focused on telling the stories of our student-athletes in multiple ways," said Moore, who is also a seasoned broadcaster calling the USC men's basketball games, among other assignments. "We obviously want to celebrate excellence, we want to celebrate winning — those things are very important to USC. And honestly, those are the things that that perform the best.

"But we also have a belief that if you make someone passionate about an athlete, or interested in an athlete, that you're more likely to participate in social media, coming to games, supporting that team. The student-athletes are always going to be what drives the machine around here."

The student-athletes are the consistent factor that can appeal to all of USC Athletics' target audiences. Even those who don't (yet) bleed cardinal and gold connect with the kids, which is a big reason why the individual sport accounts are so important even if the 'main' athletics accounts trump the majority when it comes to followers and reach. With lower scale comes more targeted, higher engagement, too, which Moore and his colleagues take into account for content production and strategic messaging. There's no magic formula to accomplishing all those aforementioned diverse goals (let's not even go into all the digital content and messaging the public does not see, often meant just for recruits via private channels), so USC has to prioritize and execute accordingly.

“Social media is a shotgun, it's not a sniper rifle," said Moore. "Sometimes I try to explain that to people [and] we'll get somebody that says, 'Oh, I want to get this message to students, let's put it on the athletics account.' And I'm like, 'Well, that's a really small percentage of the athletics account. How many students actually follow it? And then of that, what percentage is that of our total following?' I don't want to alienate 95% of our followers with any post. Obviously, when you run something like an athletics account, not everyone's going to be interested in everything and that's just the way it is. The sport accounts are going to have a little bit of a higher interaction rate."

Those sport accounts, big and small, are really important. But the overall USC Athletics 'brand' is still the sun around which all others orbit. That dichotomy is inherent in college athletics and, without guidelines in place, there is risk of individual team accounts deviating from certain brand uniformity standards, rendering incoherence and confusion across accounts that nevertheless represent the same institution. There's a careful balance — not being so strict as to denude every team of its distinct character, history, and culture while not losing that common throughline. Moore and USC take such a balanced approach, empowering individual sport accounts with the ability to riff while not losing what makes them USC Trojans.

“With that said, we also want the individual creativity of the designers and the creative teams around the individual teams, and then also the voice of the programs are just going to be different in so many ways," Moore explained. "I mean, our football program, as an example, is such a legacy brand. [It’s] been around for 100 years and has national championships and Heisman Trophy winners, so there's a certain voice that comes out of that account that is just different than our men's basketball brand, which has kind of always been the second team in town to UCLA and never historically has won anything, so we take a little bit of a chippier, edgier tone to our content. You know, we are much more likely to poke at UCLA. On the football side, there would be no reason to sort of stoop down to it kind of thing. So those are the ways that you that you look at it."

Each team stands on its own under the USC umbrella; each team with its coach setting the culture, a voice and point of view, and a unique set of student-athletes that come through every year. The dynamic nature of the roster is perhaps the most challenging aspect of all when it comes to college sports, and it's only getting tougher in the age of NIL. Professional sports long ago made its marketing start-driven, it's "[Superstar player] and the [team]" messaging, using the power of stardom and intimacy of human connections to bring fans into the fold for years. But in college, the best players on the team are on the marquee for maybe a year or two.

Many fans will gladly fall in love with a student-athlete, celebrate them, and then move on to the next batch. That equation doesn't always work so smoothly, though, especially when a transcendent individual comes along. While a professional team will have several years to leverage a player's star power to win over a fan, that timeline is significantly constricted in college. There are lessons to be learned from the pros, with their roster movement becoming more common, but the challenge remains greater for college. As NIL makes these stars shine even brighter, the risk and opportunity of fleeting phenoms donning the school colors is palpable. USC has enjoyed star players passing through Pasadena for generations. So while modern times may magnify it all, the circumstances are not new for Moore and his team.

"We're still trying to stay tapped into that relationship and hopefully those fans too," he said, reflecting on one of college sports' biggest names playing for USC this year in Bronny James. "So we'll create a lot of content around those kind of things to stay tapped into those people. But ultimately you are using their platform to sell your program. And we constantly have conversations about, 'Hey, if you have an opportunity like a Bronny, you have to capitalize on it, because a year from now you might have 12 guys that no one's ever really heard of and then are you back to square one or did you accomplish something?”

Moore also spoke about the Golden State Warriors as a real-life example, as they seek to maintain generations of fans beyond the day the Steph-Klay-Draymond dynasty ends. "That's a good example of like, 'Hey, we've got this moment right now with Steph and Draymond and Klay and we're winning titles, okay, what are we going to do with it? You're always going to be popular in San Francisco, but they found a way to extend their audience.”

There are so many avenues for fandom in college sports. Someone may come into the fold because they want to watch Bronny or heard about the exploits of women's basketball phenom JuJu Watkins or women's golf wunderkind Amari Avery, their parents or grandparents may be alums, perhaps they went to a sports camp at the school when they were kids, or they watched a Trojans team win a title. No matter the entry point it all ladders back to the brand, to the university. To manage all of the teams and content and social media is no small feat, but it's both a challenge and an opportunity because having so much to wrangle means there are also so many chances to earn engagement and win over a fan for life.

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