Griffin Hatten | Staff Writer
This is part I of 2 in a series dealing with social media usage in college athletics
Keeping your own Facebook profile and Twitter page updated is enough work in itself, but imagine needing to update another set of accounts regularly with over 2000 people keeping daily tabs on you. That is the part of the job for Buena Vista Sports Information Director (SID) Steven Phelps and the Beaver Athletics pages.
In talking about how things work with updating the social media for Beaver Athletics, Phelps had a lot to say about the work that goes into keeping the scores, stats, and overall updates.
Getting most of his information for live updates from opposing SIDs for road games, Phelps updates the social media sites as soon as he can with the most important and exciting information. Updating these sites all by himself for road and home games, he is tasked with keeping Beaver fans informed at all times.
If you’re looking for updates on Beaver Athletics, Twitter is the place to go first for the most recent updates. Phelps says he tweets slightly more than he posts to Facebook. If you’re looking for play-by-play information and in game scores and stats – go to Twitter. If photos and summaries of games are more intriguing to you, stay tuned into Beaver Athletics on Facebook.
Phelps said the BVU Athletics page has seen more views because of social media and about 50-60% of his time is spent dealing with social media. He keeps track of followers and “likes” weekly. Twitter receives more clicks to the BVU Athletics page than Facebook. Since the beginning of the school year, the Twitter page has gone from 400 followers to 836 and Facebook has seen a similar increase of 350 which has taken the likes from 1,000 to over 1,350.
Phelps says he does not monitor coaches or individuals pages but does appreciate all the updates the teams and coaches are willing to provide him.
More to come next week in regards to coach-player interaction on the social media sites.
Graphic by Keyla Sosa