Carolina Locomotives’ Social Media Plan

The Carolina Locomotives will be the very first WNBA team to call South Carolina

home! The WNBA decided to choose Columbia, South Carolina as the home for the

Locomotives because of the success of The University of South Carolina’s women’s basketball

team. With South Carolina having no professional NBA or WNBA team in the state, this will be

an amazing opportunity to create buzz about the new team in the city of dreams! The

Locomotives will play home games in the same stadium as UofSC’s women’s basketball team,

Colonial Life Arena.

With the UofSC women’s basketball team being so successful, especially this year,

having the WNBA team beside them will allow our team to create a successful social media plan

to create interest in The Locomotives. With the season starting in less than a year, tickets are

selling fast creating the perfect opportunity to boost The Locomotives. Peter Jackson, the team’s

head coach, recently signed Alex Johnson. Alex Johnon is one of the best players in the WNBA

and already has a social media presence of 100,000 followers. With the excitement of a brand

new team in Columbia and a star player who already has a following on social media, we will be

able to use all of our resources to get people excited. In general, the way our team will be

ensuring success and excitement will be to partner with the UofSC women’s basketball team and

to create a social media campaign across multiple social media platforms to reach a large

audience. By partnering with the UofSC women’s basketball team, we are easily able to target

our number one market of women’s sports fans. With the recent success of the UofSC women’s

team advancing into the Final Four, we can use this to our advantage by having some of their

players make appearances at our games, talk with our players, and so on. By using the UofSC’s
audience, we are able to easily attract viewers to come and watch our team’s games also or even

watch from home.

For our social media platforms, our team has decided to create a Locomotives platform

on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook. Although our owner did request that we create

an Instagram and Snapchat, we decided also to branch out to Twitter and Facebook in order to

create a much wider audience. Whereas Instagram and Snapchat are very popular among college

students, as well as Twitter, adding in a Facebook account will allow us to reach an older

audience, such as parents of young daughters who dream of playing basketball. Our team agreed

with the owner that Instagram and Snapchat will be a great place for our team to focus.

Instagram is a good choice for our more serious and informing posts, while Snapchat will offer

an outlet for our team to have a more relaxed and personable side. Instagram will also be a good

spot for our team to have an account since Johnson already has a strong following on the

platform. By having her post about signing to our team, we will be able to create a strong

following on Instagram very easily where there will be links and shortcuts to all of our other

social media. We decided Twitter would also be a good source to create a Locomotives’ account

because of its popularity among young adults as well as WNBA fans. Twitter will allow us to

easily tweet out information regarding game days and times. Lastly, we decided to create a

Facebook account for The Locomotives. Facebook may seem like a somewhat dead or not

hugely growing platform, however, it is a key player in creating awareness to older generations

who are more comfortable with using just Facebook. Our Facebook account will allow us to

reach even more fans of the WNBA and also allow us to reach parents in the Columbia area who

have been dreaming of being able to take their children to a WNBA game without a lot of

traveling.
 For the Locomotives’ social media tone we have decided to have a cross between a

somewhat serious side and a joking side of our team. Since we are trying to make our team look

interesting and compelling, it is important to have the women look relatable and human rather

than untouchable ‘celebrity’ figures. There is a certain look we will have to create through

photos, captions, videos, tweets, and so on in order to make our team look relatable and fun, but

also serious and focused on the game. It is important to have our team relate to the public since

we are brand new to the Columbia area. If we were to come off as too serious, we could

potentially cause consumers to turn away from our team and brand as a whole. We will also be

very interactive with our audience. Since we are a new team, our presence on social media will

allow our audience to get to know the team and feel connected to the players. It will be important

to act as if our followers are like family members to our team. By doing so we will be creating a

relationship with our consumers which likely means they will continue to come to games, buy

our merchandise and follow us on all of our different social media platforms.

As previously stated, our team will have two major target audiences. The first audience

will be college students/young adults and families. For our primary audience target of young

adults, we will call them Person X. Person X is around the age of 18-26 and lives in the

Columbia downtown area. Person X is not limited to a certain gender or sexual orientation. Since

women’s basketball has always been a supporter and ally to any and all types of people, our team

will also welcome any and all types of fans. Person X will have a low to moderate income and

live with roommates in the downtown Columbia area. Person X enjoys spending time with their

friends, frequenting breweries, and going to Soda City almost every Saturday. Person X will be

active on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. We will target Person X by partnering with local

breweries around the Columbia area, with events sponsored by The Locomotives. We will have
some of our players at the event, mingling with people enjoying the event. We will also sign up

for a booth at Soda City, that will allow us to reach the rest of our Person X demographic. At the

booth we will have free merchandise for people to snag and a coupon code for 10% off a ticket

to a home game. Our Twitter and Snapchat will be directly trying to reach the Person X

demographic with Instagram reaching multiple generations. On these platforms, we will have a

less serious tone which is popular among Generation Z and Millenials. The biggest barrier for the

Person X demographic would be affordability. Since Person X’s income is low to moderate, we

have to make the game experience worth the price of admission. In order to overcome this

barrier, we will have college nights where people with student ID’s will get in for a lower price.

We will announce these promotions over Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram.

For our secondary audience of families, we will call them the “Smiths family.” The

Smiths would be a couple in their late thirties to early forties with children from the ages of four

to ten. They will have a combined household income of $80,000-$120,000 a year and will come

to around four games a year. The Smiths will live in the Lexington or Columbia area and enjoy

going out on the weekends to family-friendly events. The Smiths will be active on Instagram but

frequent Facebook more. In order to target this audience we will host a family night once a

month. At these family nights, children under the age of 12 will get in for free. These events will

also be sponsored by a local brewery and offer parents the opportunity to unwind after a long

working weekend. If families come early, they can snag a photo of their kids with a player! The

booth at Soda City will also target this audience since Soda City is a popular event in the

Columbia area for families. The barrier most significant for the Smiths would be accessibility

and affordability. The scheduling of special event nights must be at a reasonable time on the

weekends and the price must be affordable for the Smiths to go. We will use our Facebook to
attract the Smiths. Our page will be family-friendly and offer important details about how our

team is doing and what they are doing. Our Instagram will announce game times, promotional

events, and behind the scenes with a very casual and optimistic tone overall to be attractive to

this audience.

Our sample posts (attached) are what we feel would be best to get the social media up

and running. First, the tweet from Columbia Locomotives introducing the signing of Alex

Johnson is crucial. Twitter audience is younger, so audience interaction should be high, and the

initial “we now have a star player” tactic should get people excited right off the bat. We feel as if

the Snapchat of “the new home smell” is a good one because the angle looking over the arena is

really pretty, and it shows the vast amount of cars and people already on the scene. The scene

shows that the support for games in Columbia is huge, and those subscribed to the Snapchat

account would be intrigued to check out what the buzz is about. Snapchat targets the college-

aged kids in Columbia. Colonial Life Arena is a short, well-lit, safe and beautiful walk from

campus, so students would be more inclined to take a homework break to check out a new team

as well. We feel the Instagram post of Colonial Life Arena would have a similar outcome, but

reach a wider audience than Snapchat alone. It is also more of an aerial view of the arena,

showcasing it’s best features. This was important to us to post because it’s one of the official

announcements of where the new team will be playing. Also, because the picture is visually

pleasing, people are more inclined to stop scrolling. Lastly, there’s a good chance that the tagged

location will end up on Instagram’s “Explore” page, reaching more people than just those who

already follow the Columbia Locomotives page. With the Facebook post, we are intending to

reach families, as Facebook’s audience is a little older and more family-oriented than Snapchat

or Twitter. The promotion included in the post is perfect for families, and though it targets
mothers and daughters (for an all around women empowerment game) the whole family is

welcome to attend and enjoy watching their family members engage with players before and

after the game. If the families post such footage back on social media, that’s more free

advertising for the Locomotives. Lastly, the other tweet showing Johnson’s point updates is good

for a few reasons. First, we want to keep our fans updated on Twitter of the scores and stats in

case they can’t watch the game or are distracted and miss something. Second, it allows fans to

keep up with Alex Johnson, our original star player. Third, it gives us a consistent presence on

Twitter, so we keep showing up on the timelines, but not in an annoying way that clutters

someone’s page.

Our plan on social media to sell shirts comes down to a few key initiatives. First, we post

the shirts sported by the players and we include a link to the team website for buying purposes

(which will already be linked in the bio), as well as a caption that encourages people to represent

the team. Then, we repost pictures of fans in our shirts. We would post Instagram stories during

gametime of those in our merchandise, we would catch some pics of players in their warm-up

shirts, etc. Additionally, we have a retail setup in Colonial Life Arena during home games, and

our social media manager will post the merchandise table on the Instagram story as well. The

main point here is to show that by our team wearing the shirts fans will be inspired to purchase

and wear the shirts as well. We will repost as much as we can on our stories (Facebook,

Snapchat, Instagram), and repost tagged posts so that fans that don’t have the shirts yet will see

them and inquire. Also, we would like to use these platforms to interact with fans regarding

merchandise questions such as sizing, inventory availability, design. Lastly, we could do a

promotion where before a home game, everyone that wears the shirt(s) being marketed at the

time, can come up to our booth before the game and get a free hot dog voucher while supplies
last. We would offer around 200 free hot dog vouchers at one game a month or more, depending

on how sales are going. This would also be advertised on the platforms. On Instagram and

Facebook, this kind of promotion would get it’s own post. On Snapchat, we could add a video of

us talking about it to our story (wearing said shirt), and we could simply tweet it out the week of

game day with a picture of the required shirt on Twitter.

We will definitely be using graphics and video on our page, for various reasons.

Graphics, if executed properly, can be huge attention grabbers. The right colors and photos

would stop a scrolling user to check it out, even if they don’t stop scrolling for long. We will use

videos such as highlights, funny videos (like draw what you think your teammate looks like), and

hype videos to get fans excited to come to the games. This has worked well in professional sports

when it includes popular music and star players.

Using social media will increase return on investment tremendously. In this day and age,

social media gets the word out about anything to millions of people quickly. It is estimated that

71% of Americans are on one form of social media or another. Word travels even faster when

people engage with our posts, which is what we are looking for: recognition and attention

brought to our new brand. Sports teams everywhere use social media to build their brand, and

these platforms are useful for more ways than one. Consumers can find links to merchandise,

watch never-before-seen content, engage with the team and staff, watch live videos, see

professional pictures of their favorite players, and stay up to date on all team news. The

investment on social media is important in order to market our team, build our brand, compete in

the professional sports race, and grow support across the country.