How the Women’s Professional Soccer Twitter campaign has developed

This blog post takes a brief look at how Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) and its teams have used Twitter. We’ll look at the early days of Twitter integration and how it’s evolved as a sports marketing tool. Then, we’ll discuss a couple ideas for utilizing Twitter’s new List feature. Keep in mind this is a very short post on a topic I could describe for days. More follow-up posts to follow for sure.

The Early Days

WPS was a pretty early Twitter adopter. The Chicago Red Stars started using Twitter (@chicagoredstars) actively in the summer of 2008 and in September, Karyn Lush (@klush17) at the League office used Twitter to announce the teams’ U.S. Women’s National Team allocations (Check out @the_real_nash – left, WPS owner/investor and basketball legend – at the USWNT Allocation above). I love that Karyn posted a thorough explanation/recommednation to receive text messages via Twitter back in September 2008 :-)

While I always felt extremely supported by those around me, I do remember there were a number of people who were resistant to using a social media tool like Twitter as a “live feed” for information. Folks couldn’t understand, if we only had 150 people following us, what good could this tool possibly be as a communication device? I’m just making this reference to remind us that may seem like a no-brainer to use Twitter today, but it wasn’t all easy going at the beginning. And when the next useful communication tool comes along, I’m sure there will be a period of resistance before adoption actually makes sense.

Growth

After the USWNT Allocation, most WPS teams and a number of staff members started Twitter accounts, but at that time we were all still a little hazy on exactly how we could best utilize it. Teams started using Twitter as a way to link to “external” news stories, like The New York Times Soccer Blog stories or Pitch Invasion columns. Over the course of 2008-2009, team strategies evolved to also include link-building, live game coverage, holiday specials, community development, ticket offers, and more. The league originally used Twitter to make major announcements, host live feeds and drive traffic back to our homepage. In-season, we included live game-coverage, and now as the off-season we’ve been working to retweet important and interesting team news and engage more with fans. What I love about social media marketing is that it’s an constantly evolving marketplace.

Growth has been steady and consistent. To demonstrate the relative growth of our teams’ Twitter accounts, here’s a snapshot look at Chicago Red Stars, Boston Breakers and Saint Louis Athletica twitter accounts over the past three months (check out TwitterCounter.com – a very cool tool for Twitter stats):

Now, every WPS team has a Twitter page, and I’ve listed out the accounts below (keep in mind these are stats that will have already changed by the time you’re reading this). Even though I feel like I’ve been Tweeting forever, I look at these statistics and am reminded that Twitter is still very young.

• Atlanta Beat @atlbeat (Not quite active yet as they’re using @atlantabeatGM for team information until the Draft)
• Boston Breakers @bostonbreakers (Following: 289; Followers: 1,202; Listed: 25)
• Chicago Red Stars @chicagoredstars (Following: 2,719; Followers: 2,495; Listed: 30)
• Los Angeles Sol @losangelessol (Following: 111; Followers: 1,283; Listed: 20)
• Philadelphia Independence @wpsphilly2010 (Following:214 ; Followers: 485; Listed: 13)
• Sky Blue FC @skybluefc (Following: 26; Followers: 789; Listed: 22)
• Saint Louis Athletica @athleticasoccer (Following: 1996; Followers: 1621; Listed: 23)
• Washington Freedom @dcfreedom (Following: 63; Followers: 1,141; Listed: 22)
• Women’s Professional Soccer @womensprosoccer (Following: 479; Followers: 40,500; Listed: 105)

I’ll leave team Twitter strategies to our web managers to describe, perhaps a future interview/post? ;-)

Suggested User List

Three weeks ago, the @womensprosoccer profile was listed on the Suggested Users List. And as I’m writing this post, we’ve already gone from 7,000 to 50,000 followers in less than 3 weeks! I’ve had a ton of questions as to how we got onto the list, and here’s what Twitter says:

We’ve explained that the Suggested Users list is a bit like your local book store’s staff picks but there’s a little more to it than that. Our Chief Scientist developed a program that scans active Twitter accounts for a bunch of key ingredients such as how much of the profile is filled out, certain indications that the account is interesting to others in some respects, and a few other signals. For example, is the account a good introduction to Twittering for a new user? Does the person or organization running the account have a fairly wide or mainstream appeal? If they are a celebrity or business, have we confirmed it’s really them? Finally, we’ll do a gut check internally with a couple folks before adding them to the Suggested Users list. The list continues to grow and change although only a subset of twenty accounts are randomly displayed as suggestions during the new user signup process. Twitter is not paid to include accounts in this list. The Suggested Users feature exists to do a job—it makes Twitter more relevant and valuable to users. All that being said, when we find out Oprah starts Twittering for real we may very well put her on the list.

So, a BIG shout out and HUGE thank you to Twitter for adding us to your list!!! And another HOO-RAH to our FANS for their consistent engagement and retweeting. We would have never gotten on this list without you – and because of you, the WPS message is already reaching 500% more people. Wow, that’s seriously amazing.

Twitter Lists

Of note, since we launched our new web platform at womensprosoccer.com back in April 2009, WPS has kept an updated list of league and team owners, staff and players on the website here: http://www.womensprosoccer.com/Home/connect/wps-twitter-list.aspx. We do our best to keep this list up-to-date and accurate, so if you see anything that needs to be changed, or you know of more people who should be listed, please let me know.

In a magnificent move I’m convinced Twitter accomplished to help me personally manage this project, Twitter launched “Lists”. We’re super-excited about this feature and have incorporated the top two lists below into our Twitter strategy. I’m still trying to think of other useful/creative ways we can utilize them. These ideas aren’t quite flushed out yet either, which is exactly why I’m posting it here… YOU are our best resource, so please share your ideas! Also, here’s a great Mashable resource you may want to reference: 10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists.

• Already created: @womensprosoccer/teams – Follow each of the WPS teams (I’ve listed all the accounts above in this post). Use this list to learn about team news, promotions, updates, player transactions, and more.
• Already created: @womensprosoccer/players – Follow the WPS players. That this will be your most reliable source for actual WPS players on Twitter. I personally guarantee ;-) it will be kept up-to-date and players twitter accounts will be added and dropped as transactions come through the league office.
• Idea: @womensprosoccer on Game Day – Follow the game you’re specifically in. For example, if Chicago Red Stars are playing Los Angeles Sol, we could make a list @womensprosoccer/chi-la and include the players, staff, and teams that are all involved in that game. What do you think?
• Idea: @womensprosoccer/reporters – Follow all the people who write about WPS. Jacqueline Purdy, Steven Goff, Beau Dure, Jack Bell, Jaff Kassouf, AreYouOnTheBall, Tom Dunmore, Nicole Hack and more! (Did I miss you? Let me know in the Comments!)
• Idea: @womensprosoccer/staff – Follow WPS and Team employees. Could include Owners, General Managers, front office staff and more. Or perhaps we could just make a list of WPS League employees and let each team manage their own employee list. I have a created a personal list of these folks, but I’m not convinved our WPS fans would be generally interested in having it linked from the womensprosoccer account – what do you think?

Tell me, Twitter

Of course wouldn’t expect all these features to be available at launch, but I do have a couple questions for Twitter regarding the list feature, and its future development, because I think the answers to these questions will impact how we use the List Feature.

1. Will users be able to write Descriptions for their lists?
2. Will followers be able to send List Updates to their Mobile Devices?
3. Will RSS feeds of Lists be available?

The Future

Who knows what the future holds for Twitter in general, much less as a sports marketing tool. There are already people out there trying to develop the next big Social “thing”. But one important point remains: Led by Commissioner Tonya Antonucci’s innovative and forward-thinking vision, Women’s Professional Soccer will be at the forefront of whatever useful communications technology comes along.