National Signing Day a Big Hit with Gator Fans
Thursday, February 5, 2015 | Football, Men's Swimming & Diving, Scott Carter
Information Compiled by the UAA Communications Staff.
The Florida football team had a successful signing day on Wednesday, picking up several important pieces to add to the roster as head coach Jim McElwain and his staff continue preparations for the 2015 season.
With all the excitement throughout the day, as evidenced by a quadrupling of traffic on GatorZone.com from a year ago, National Signing Day is a great event for Gator fans to follow on social media as decisions are being announced. To illustrate that, we've compiled some data from our various social media accounts to see how powerful the impact of today's social media can be.
As announcements were being made on Wednesday, the first official announcements were made from Coach McElwain's personal twitter account (@CoachMcElwain). Shortly after, the official football twitter account, @GatorZoneFB, announced each signing with a personalized graphic welcome each new Gator.
For the day, the @GatorZoneFB account made a total of 52 posts that were posted over 1.2 million Twitter users. For comparison, that figure is higher than seven game days from the fall. The posts totaled over 92,000 engagements, a 7.4 percent engagement rate, which is higher than any single game day from the 2014 season.
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@GatorZoneFB By the Numbers |
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1.2 million |
Overall Impressions |
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7.2% |
Engagement Rate |
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6.7K |
Link Clicks |
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6.1K |
Favorites |
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4.1K |
Retweets |
In addition, the @GatorZoneNews twitter account had a total reach of nearly 750,000 for the 12-hour time span of 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
The keywords “Florida Gators” had an even bigger impact, with a potential reach of 11.9 million and over 38,000 mentions. The conversation surrounding “Florida Gators” was 61% positive as measured through social media analytic software.
With the help of social media analytic software, we are able to track the conversation surrounding certain hashtags and keywords for a given time period. The #Gators15 hashtag, created to centralize the conversation around Florida's signing day, totaled nearly 6,600 mentions and had a potential reach of 4.1 million. The conversation had peaks at different points throughout the day, as illustrated by the tweet below.
Tracking social metrics for #Gators15, can you tell when @tezivey made his announcement? pic.twitter.com/e27Kcuz6Od
— GatorZone Football (@GatorZoneFB) February 4, 2015
The image in the above tweet seemed to be the hit of the day with Gator fans, as highly-touted offensive lineman Martez Ivey signed his letter of intent to play for the Gators in the fall.
The official announcement of Ivey's signing from @GatorZoneFB produced the single tweet with the highest reach of the day at over 61,000 impressions.The tweet and graphic welcoming Ivey to the Gators' signing class also had the most retweets (477) and favorites (568) of any post on the day.
Newest commit is a big one (literally)...o-lineman @tezivey from Apopka. Welcome to the fam! #Gators15 pic.twitter.com/XtYkSJC1eo
— GatorZone Football (@GatorZoneFB) February 4, 2015
We also found out that The Gator Nation enjoys some light-hearted fun. The tweet below, sent at 2:22 p.m. after Florida had just received official confirmation of several commitments, had the highest number of engagements of any post on the day at nearly 12,000.
An engagement includes any interaction with a single tweet, including clicks anywhere on the Tweet (hashtags, links, avatar, username and Tweet expansion), retweets, replies, follows and favorites. With an overall reach of over 60,000 for the below tweet, the engagement rate of around 20 percent was astoundingly high.
Right now... #Gators15 pic.twitter.com/FBR63r0MRp
— GatorZone Football (@GatorZoneFB) February 4, 2015
