Orange County Soccer Club fans have been blessed with the commitment and superb performances of Goalie Colin Shutler throughout his three year tenure with the club. Signed as a free agent in March of 2022, Shutler has since become a steadfast player and icon within the club. He is OCSC’s all time leading goalie…
To best paint the career of OCSC’s most capped goalie, the most appropriate place to start would be with his first foray into professional soccer. Colin performed well in his college years at the University of Virginia and was selected by FC Dallas in the MLS Superdraft in 2021, whereupon he went on loan to FC Dallas affiliate club, North Texas SC.
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.
Going into 2023 our main social media platforms were Facebook and Twitter/X, with some dabbling on Instagram. The enabling goal here was to leverage social media to drive people to our website for written articles and by extension get them hooked on the show (whether they watch live or recorded).
The goal was to have daily, eye-catching content that increased our social media followers, and by just numbers get more people to read our written work and convert them into live-show viewers. After some coaching from my niece, I landed on three main tasks
In this article we’ll talk about my approach to increase just general awareness of the show in the team’s fan base.
Unfortunately, ‘awareness’ isn’t a metric I could measure directly. That would require a lot more polling of the fan base over the course of the season, and we neither have the bandwidth nor the budget to take that on. But, as I’ve learned at work, use the metrics you have to tell the story you can tell. If the Terminal Goal was to increase the show audience, then “more awareness” would mean more people would tune into the show. Right? Please tell me I’m right. I admit we’re making a few assumptions here, and they will probably be my downfall.
It’s only January 1st and we’re already talking about how Orange & Black Soccercast will continue to be the first and only show dedicated to Orange County Soccer Club in 2025.
That’s right fans, it’s Producer Andy and it’s Wednesday. If you haven’t figured it out already, not only do I do all the background work for the live show, I also run most of the shows social media. Going into 2024, I made specific goals for the show and our social media presence, so as we start planning for 2025 I will layout some of what we planned for 2024, how we approached those plans, and how it worked in the end.
