This is part four of a multi-article series. Click here to read the first article about Terminal Goals and Results, second article about Enabling Goal 1, and third article about Enabling Goal 2.
In the previous article, I talked about:
Terminal Goal — Increase show audience to 10% of game-day attendance
Enabling Goal 1 — Increase fan-base awareness
Enabling Goal 2 — Increase Social Media click-through
And in this article we’ll talk about
Enabling Goal 3 — Increase Instagram engagement
Increase Follower Count
Before the Manychat experiment, I made a goal to get 1,000 followers on Instagram before the end of the season. That was a goal we reached and even exceed.
As for how did I get them? That was something I had to get my head around, and honestly I struggled with it. After talking to a few other content creators, it is clear most people won’t follow an account unless they’re prompted to. Which really means you have to go find followers. That means sifting through the ‘likes’ on the team’s posts and following every account that falls into your target audience. Some of those will follow you back. Some will leave you on read. Some will be bots, spammers, and scammers. This was time consuming for me, and usually meant an hour a day of just digging through accounts, sending them a follow, and most importantly trying to remember which ones you already sent a follow request that they rejected.
Feb 28, before we really start our weekly show for 2024, Instagram had 500 followers. On September 15 we crossed 1,000 and today we have 1,217.
As for measuring ‘engagement,’ when we lost the functionality to live-stream to Twittex, we swapped that over to Instagram and picked up 30-40 views per episode each week.
This doesn’t include Instagram as we didn’t live stream there until the summer.
We started live streaming to Instagram later in the year, so this shows just that time frame
Again, the whole goal of increasing our presence on Instagram was to work the algorithm, get more followers, and leverage our following to get more people viewing the show on whatever platform they’re on. We saw far more follower engagement on IG than we ever did on FB, so we leaned into it, started using the Reels feature to promote the show- both in clips from a prior show, promoting an upcoming show, highlighting specific comments from the hosts or guests, and promoting the score prediction contest. Once I started targeting active Instagram users, our engagement in the end of End-of-July/early-August time frame really grew.
This is total engagements each week. Each like, share, and comment counts as one account engagement.
As the total engagement per post rose, we also saw a decrease in the percentage of engagements per post. More people were seeing our posts, more people were engaging with them, but as a percentage of our entire follower base, the engagement wasn’t tracking. This is maybe a result of straying from our core audience and not grabbing the full attention of more peripheral fans. Through the summer months, we were averaging 30-40% engagement, peaking at 52%.
By the end of the season we were down in the 17-25% range. End of the season fatigue could factor into this as well. I tracked through the end of the year but engagement with our team-specific posts dried up through that time period. I think that, overall, we’re going after the right followers and giving them content they want to see. (ed. note: if you want more of a certain type of content, let us know in the comments or on social media)
We’ll see how things progress through 2025.
With Larry holding down the game-day live video and me pumping out content through the week, we had a decent amount of engagement once we found our groove, and referrals from the platform to the website continue to look good. We’re going to keep with this strategy for 2025, and I want to see about getting some more giveaways to do throughout the year, even if I have to buy a few items. More engagement means the platform shows more followers our content, and more people seeing it means more engagement, so it’s kind of a self-powering cycle.
So What?
If you followed this series of articles, you might either be saying “this guy is an idiot” or “man that sounds like a lot of work.” I won’t deny the first statement, but the second statement is true. Is it work like digging sprinkler trenches? No. But it is a lot of tedious fiddly work to capture all these figures manually and then making some sense out of it in a way that makes sense. AND THEN figuring out a way to make content that people want to see.
Like I said earlier, this isn’t my day job and I’m still figuring things out as I fumble along. I honestly didn’t think we’d really improved in 2024 until I started compiling the season-long data you’ve seen here. Watching it day-to-day and week-to-week it’s easy to get too focused on the small numbers and not back up far enough to see the broader picture of a 42% increase in average views per show.
Thank you
That being said- thank you. And I mean it. Thank you for tuning in every week to the first and only show dedicated to Orange County Soccer Club. Thank you for continuing to prove to the world that second division professional soccer can exist and thrive in Orange County.
We’re all excited for an even better 2025— both on the pitch and on the live show. We hope that you’ll come along for the journey and support the show and the team, win or lose, every week.
How can you help us?
How can you help us for free? Follow us on social media; like, repost, and comment on whatever we post. If you’re a YouTube only person, make sure to follow and turn on notifications. This helps YouTube recognize what kind of people like our show and then recommends it to other people.
Watch or listen to the show, either live on YouTube or recorded on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or even from YouTube (we usually upload an audio-only version soon after the live show).
If you have friends who follow the team, encourage them to check out the show, whether they listen live or recorded. The best way for us to find more OCSC fans is through other OCSC fans.
Getting our message through on social media is like drinking from a fire hydrant. There are so many other companies with seemingly unlimited budgets to push cheap knock off products to your feed, it’s hard for us to make a dent in that. But if you keep listening, we’ll keep doing it. This is a labor of love for all of us, and none of us have illusions of this becoming a ‘job’ any time soon. We’d be happy to just cover our fixed costs for website space and the show platform.
Thank you again- stay tuned as we get ready for 2025. Kit releases and Media Day will be here before you know it.
