CROWDTANGLE CASE STUDY

How the Florida Gators Use CrowdTangle Leaderboards to Win Social Media THE CHALLENGE

How do you manage the social media presence of a national sports brand — with only a one-man social media team? Bruce Floyd, the social media director for the NCAA’s Florida Gators, does it all. He’s tasked with maintaining multiple school athletics accounts, monitoring the social media presence of individual players, and making sure his content resonates with a national audience. “We have a lot of teams, posting lots of content. You don’t always know what’s going to resonate with people — could be any number of things. You can guess, but it’s not easy,” Bruce says. “We’re also trying to help athletes understand their personal brand.” In a world of scores and rankings, Bruce says “CrowdTangle helps us improve what we’re doing.”

“We’re also trying to help athletes understand their personal brand … CrowdTangle helps us improve what we’re doing.” Bruce Floyd Social Media Director

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CROWDTANGLE CASE STUDY

How the Florida Gators Use CrowdTangle Leaderboards to Win Social Media THE METHOD The Gators use CrowdTangle to track 958 accounts across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Bruce explains: “It gives me a quick overview of the landscape, both internally amongst our different programs, and also externally it helps us evaluate what our competitors are doing. I use the thing every day.” Lists, viral alerts, and CrowdTangle’s leaderboards have specifically helped the Gators #win on social.

MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS ROLLED INTO ONE CrowdTangle can bundle pages together into single lists that are more easy to digest. This takes the stress out of mass-account management.


“Just by having these lists it makes things easier for me,” Bruce says. Bruce has created lists of peer pages and rivals. He’s able to track what the competition posts, and see which of their posts get the most engagement. This allows him to apply their winning strategies to his own pages. Bruce has also built lists from outside of the sports world to track news and influencer content, which further broadens the Gators’ social media scope. “It gives me the opportunity to do a bit more social exploration and see what’s popular now and what’s working. That’s helpful for my creative process."

Overperforming Post

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CROWDTANGLE CASE STUDY

How the Florida Gators Use CrowdTangle Leaderboards to Win Social Media ALERTS WHEN POSTS GO VIRAL CrowdTangle’s custom email notifications alert you when a post from a particular page or set of pages are doing well. “With the alerts, I get a notification when something’s heating up,” Bruce says. “I can look and say ‘if it’s overperforming on their page, then our fans will find it interesting as well.’ This keeps me from constantly having to look at all these different pages and make those determinations.” Bruce has set up a daily overview of all Gator accounts on each platform. “I can see how our pages are doing and what they’re posting and what they’ve been successful with,” he says.

COMPARING AGAINST RIVAL PAGES CrowdTangle’s leaderboards allow you to benchmark pages against each other, showing which pages are winning in terms of engagement and page growth. This helps to shine light on any best practices that can provide a competitive edge. “The leaderboard resonates with me, especially since I live in a world of scores and rankings, so it keeps me competitive,” Bruce says.

“We’re always looking at rankings. We use leaderboards to motivate us and energize us.”

SE C Athletics L eader board

Bruce Floyd Social Media Director CrowdTangle © 2016 All Rights Reserved.

CROWDTANGLE CASE STUDY

How the Florida Gators Use CrowdTangle Leaderboards to Win Social Media THE RESULTS CrowdTangle has allowed the Gators to rethink their social content and save time doing work that would have otherwise taken hours to complete. The Gators recently posted a video of their 2016 football team posing in The Swamp’s bleachers. When comparing this post against other SEC team content on CrowdTangle, Bruce noticed that another rival team hadn’t posted a video — instead they had posted a photo and that photo had gone viral. Bruce tried a new post, this time a photo. It overperformed for him, too. “It was a reminder that our fans want to see certain things, and CrowdTangle let us know that,” Bruce says. Even better is the time he has saved. Before CrowdTangle, Bruce and a team of interns spent hours manually scraping Facebook and Twitter for engagement data. Using CrowdTangle’s dashboards, this has turned into a process that takes just seconds. This allows Bruce to focus more of his time on strategy. “CrowdTangle takes care of some lower level tasks so then I can work on higher level goals,” Bruce says. “It frees up time so we can focus on content creation, not research.”

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