Practicum #7 - Max

A couple of weeks ago, I examined the Stanford Women's Soccer Team's Twitter page. Over the weekend, Stanford lost to Notre Dame in the NCAA finals. Notre Dame women's soccer does not have a Twitter page (what a shame!) so I will instead turn my focus to the men's tournament, in which the final four is set.

The season for the UW men's soccer team has been over for several weeks, as they were bounced from the Big Ten tournament by Michigan. Michigan has taken their opportunity and run with it, as they have made the final four of the 2010 men's soccer tournament. As a rival Big Ten soccer program, I chose to take a look at their page and examine some of the similarities and differences between their page and ours.

To begin, they have different style with their handle. They (all of Michigan sports) use an underscore in their name. Also, they do not have consistency with their handles across different sports; ours all are "Badger(then M or W)Sport" whereas Michigan goes with "michigan_sport" and the sport for them is sometimes spelled out, sometimes not. Sometimes Michigan is capitalized, sometimes not. This is a minor detail, sure, but small details like this make it harder to search for their page. They do have a lot more followers than we do (they are over 1,000). Another thing they do that we don't is they have good cross-sport marketing.A tweet from 12/4 reads "good luck @michigan_mbball." This is a smart move; it creates awareness for other sports as well as shows good support for other programs on campus. This is a good note for the future (we have not done much tweeting on the soccer accounts since the season has been over). Finally, they do a good job with who they follow. They only follow other Michigan sports teams as well as Michigan soccer sites (this adds credibility to their page). We are the same -- we do not follow random pages in an effort to show our followers we are an official page.

I mentioned that we have not done much tweeting on the soccer accounts since their seasons are over, but that does not mean the tweeting stops! I have taken over much of the tweeting on our main account @uwbadgersdotcom and will do so exclusively from men's hockey and women's basketball this weekend at the Kohl Center! If you do not follow, you should for behind the scenes photos and access to Badger athletics this weekend! I'll have comments about my experiences over the weekend -- until then, ON WISCONSIN!

http://twitter.com/UWBadgersdotcom