Facebook final

This is the facebook page I have chosen to take over and I will be continuing to run it for the remainder of the semester and maybe even into the summer.      https://www.facebook.com/uthouseofhoops/ 

My main focus is going to be to encourage players and parents to tell their friends about the gym and eventually have room and time for more classes to help these younger basketball players develop their game.  I will also be posting a player of the week award each week, teams schedules ( to help take phone calls away from our head coach every single week when the games for our 25 teams change two nights before the games are to be played), and a section that will be called coaches corner. It is basically going to be advice from our coaches in the gym and the community that will let kids know what kind of things coaches look for in young developing athletes if they are going to recruit them or not. This may also be bounced around with the drill of the week which will be a video clip submitted of a few short drills kids can do at their houses to improve ball handling and control.

Facebook Personas: and the plan!

Mary 41, Mary is a mother of 4 kids from ages 13-7 who works full time and doesn't have the time on her own to coach and help her children develop in the sport of basketball like she would like them to. Her kids love basketball but she is always so busy it is hard to find a gym that will take her kids and allow her to leave and run errands while the kids play and improve on their skills without her having to be present providing adult supervision.

Jameson 17, plays high school basketball for his local high school but has recently found that if he wishes to continue playing the sport he loves he needs to dedicate more time and make it a passion. He struggles to push himself to get better and thinks he would do better in a group environment where other kids would be pushing themselves to get better at the same time they improve individual skills.

George 47, Has been coaching his son and sons friends for the past 3 years but doesn't have the time to keep running practices for them during the week. He wants to still have the ability to coach his son and his sons friends but is only able to find time once a week to coach them, he is looking for someone or somewhere to take his kids and help them develop while he continues doing what he needs to durning the week.

What do parents want their kids to do if they sign them up? (improve, learn, progress)
What does our gym offer that others might not? (Passionate coaches? Do they want to be there or are they doing it for the money?)

Who is the audience? The audience is extremely broad, anyone with children from 1st grade to 11th grade who want their kids improving basketball skills.

Our strategy is simple at the House of Hoops. We are looking to create winners, not only on the court but also off of it. We focus on each kid individually and also look at them in groups to help each player and team succeed. Our coaches want to win as badly as anyone but at the same time we realize that at this point in kids careers it is just as important if not more important that the kids learn to love the game of basketball and not get caught up in winning and losing. In order to make this page compelling to the parents we will need to see some success and some improvement. Whether the success comes form winning games or just as simply as helping kids to have fun and enjoy themselves while being active. (we have had multiple parents tell us their kids love coming to the gym and they have seen big changes in attitudes since joining the gym as well. Always a great thing to hear from some parents)

I will be working towards figuring out whether we get more results from posting words or pictures throughout the first few months and that will help us as a gym to decide if we want to try and cross promote via instagram or twitter.  Right now I am leaning towards instagram mainly because I understand it better but we will see in what ways we will cross promote.

Facebook Ad

Creating an add for the Facebook!

97,000 people in the projected reach. Only chose three targeting words because I felt like that was enough to get my reach to what it is that I was looking for. 

I chose this picture because it fits the add screen the best out of all of my other pictures that i was thinking about selecting. 

SO HOW DID IT GO?

So that was the main idea of the facebook page from the get go. However things took a change when I wasn't having much success getting people to view the page. One thing I began to notice was that if i added a picture with the posts they would get out to more people. (example from my first post I only had 88 views...

Later in the weeks and months to follow i began to post pictures with short comments and began to see some success and get more reach!

 This photo was posted of a schedule for our 2nd grade bracket tournament. 276 people were reached and I got direct feedback from multiple parents who had children playing for different teams who appreciated the schedule being posted for all to see in such a simple place.
I continued to use the picture method throughout the year with different ideas, from players of the week to championship teams.

As you can see the player of the week jumped the people reached up into the 300's and more. I am satisfied with how many people are being reached on these posts and the facebook page because prior to me taking over the house of hoops page nobody was ever posting on here and it was basically dormant. 

TOP POST

 With 1700 people reached this post blew everything out of the water in terms of expectations. It was awesome to see something i posted get so many views and the House of Hoops get recognized or seen by so many people.

STATS

Here we go with some of the results I was abel to come away with from my insights.

So post reach started out fairly well considering in september through January we were completely inactive. As we moved through the season and began posting schedules and players of the week we noticed a slight bump in the reach and we had one week absolutely spike with the picture from above.

The best time to post according to my data from the insights section turned out to be 8:00 p.m. The day didn't really matter, almost 2000 people were on the Facebook every day that were capable of seeing anything posted.

I alluded to this earlier, but all of my most successful posts came from Pictures. If the post did not have a picture with it very rarely was it reaching more than 80 to 100 people. I believe almost all other photos reached over 100 views.

PEOPLE

So with the people I ran into a big problem. Not so much that 90% of the people are male, but more so that half if not more than half of the followers are followers who thought they were following the House of Hoops Footlocker page... So that kind of throws all of my data for a loop, (not something I could prevent considering the likes and followers were already following before I got started on the page). As you can tell only 95 fans from St. George, the main city... So as I look back over the data it is hard to tell what percentage of views actually came from people in the area and not just people from around the country thinking they were following foot locker.

SUMMARY

When I set out on this mission to make the facebook page active again, my main goal was to surpass the views and reach that it had gotten in the past. One week into this project though I quickly realized that isn't the purpose of a facebook page. I changed my plan of just trying to get views to now trying to get the business out there to as many people as I could. I went about this by trying to get people an insider look at what goes on in the gym. I began to post about all of the teams we had working out, all of their games, their results week by week, and then finally started doing players of the week which also helped out as a coach and got the kids attention a little more during practice and led to them working hard at least for a few days at a time. In conclusion to how I think the campaign went I am not fully convinced it was super successful. There are plenty of things I would change if I were to try this campaign again. Like I said before, one of the most successful ways of doing things and getting views was through pictures. This success has led to the gym getting an Instagram account (which I will advertise as soon as it is finalized). This campaign however did increase the traffic on the facebook page by 100% considering it had been dormant since September 2015. So i was successful in getting people to notice the gym was up and still running but I would do things differently if I were to do this again.

What would I change?

The very first thing I would do if I were to do this facebook campaign again is create a brand new page instead of taking one over. The problem that I had with this page already being started was more than three quarters of the followers only followed thinking this was the Footlocker House of Hoops. So having 2,000 followers and only getting 100 views is frustrating and it messes with your numbers. So what I would do differently is I would create a new page for the House of Hoops and then send the information out to all of our current players and tell their parents all the updates will be on the facebook page so they can look for them on there. Secondly I would take flyers around to all of the high school basketball coaches in the area, both boys and girls that had our facebook page info on it as well as a schedule for the upcoming months. I would also offer a discount for people who could prove they were following the page. This would allow for me to get more accurate ratings and numbers or results from the page itself. And lastly I would try to run a weekly challenge on the page that would require some posting involvement to the page. (example: first person to post a video of them making 10 free throws in a row receives a free t-shirt or 10 dollars off their next month of workouts) Encouraging people to want to comment and use the page for not only their benefit but to get it out there for others to see.