Did you know that Coastal Carolina University has a lacrosse team and won the ASUN championship last season? If you don’t know much about lacrosse, it might be time to get more involved with our school’s sports. Also, the improvements to our Instagram have really boosted the visibility of the sport at Coastal.
In the same way that an influencer gains followers and fame, a team gains recognition and attraction for not only the team but also the school. To understand the importance of a team’s social media you must first understand you are unable to have a successful team without commitment. You can’t have good commitment until you have desirable assets to offer and you can’t show off these assets without a popular social media platform.
Many advertising strategies were used to develop the CoastalWLax instagram but some of the main ideas included understanding the audience, creating engaging content, and collaborations.
UNDERSTANDING AUDIENCE
When looking at the product, or in this case the team, that is being advertised you must acknowledge the audience you are trying to reach. Who do you want to be attracted to the account? What do your followers look like? These are critical questions that the creator needs to think about when creating the look of the profile. For the women’s lacrosse team, we are looking to gain the following of young girls (aged 14-18 yrs) looking to continue their lacrosse career in college at the Division 1 (D1) level. This is a crucial age for young lacrosse players, where they idolize every collegiate athlete and have fantasies about being just like the older players someday. Having a fun and decorated Instagram will grab the attention of the young athlete and increase their desire to attend the school for lacrosse. Creating a popular Instagram will expose potential recruits to the cool resources offered by the school which will cause skilled athletes to pick Coastal over another school they are interested in.
CREATING ENGAGING CONTENT
After understanding your target audience, it is important to start creating engaging content that will attract views to your profile and then hopefully encourage them to follow your account. This is the dealbreaker between getting views on a profile/post and gaining followers by posting good quality, consistent content. For the Coastal Lacrosse team, we mainly use images and videos to boost our social media. The Instagram is filled with content from practice whether that be a hard workout, a drill or two, or the players getting hyped in front of the camera. Last year, Coastal Lacrosse invested in a content creator/ editor, Jake Bashura, who professionally goes by the name @jakecr8s. Jake would attend specific practices, all games (home or away), and events held by the team to take flicks for Instagram. Our Instagram leveled up tremendously after the arrival of Jake and we are still seeing growth even after he left due to graduation.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5mMSzvrIW8/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
With the development of our Instagram, we can create edits for young girls and their parents to be notified when camps/ prospect days are being held on campus so they can be recruited to play at Coastal if they are interested.
Currently, our assistant Coach handles the social media accounts, specifically Instagram where she constantly is recording and creating content for our viewers. She does an amazing job coming up with ideas for content such as interviewing the team with a trendy question, tours of the school & athletic facility, videos showing our team volunteering, any activities we do as a team, and THE BEACH. Though in the moment my team and I make fun of her for always recording and having us pose for pictures or videos, realistically it has helped our team so much. It may seem stupid, but the future success of this lacrosse team relies on the silly videos and interviews we do for Instagram.
COLLABORATIONS
After the addition of Jake, our account was recognized by other popular lacrosse accounts that would repost and support edits created by Jake. This was so cool to see, especially when well-known accounts would post/comment about our games. When Jake would post an edited video that he felt confident in, he would use the new instagram feature to request a collaboration with the most popular lacrosse accounts and most of the time they would accept and collab with @coastalwlax. This is a great way to expose the lacrosse community to no only our team and new program but our growing school as well! Along with collaborating with other accounts, Jake and our current creator will request or tag the featured athlete in the post. This would cause the player to repost the post causing all their followers to view, like, comment and then even repost. We as collegiate athletes are followed by many young girls looking to play lacrosse in college so us reposting the Coastal instagram will draw a lot of attention to the account. This is a great way for our team to gain followers and attraction quickly and efficiently!
CLOSING
Following these advertising strategies are proven to help you gain followers, attract viewers and engagement in whatever you plan to advertise. When thinking of advertising, not many people correlate the idea of recruiting for a team with advertising but it is true. Many teams not just the Coastal Lacrosse team put an emphasis on a strong social media platform such as instagram. The future of the lacrosse team does in fact rely on the attraction Coastal Carolina gets based off of their social media accounts as well as the success of the other teams at Coastal.
Teaching Social Media 