Managing Digital Content for a Professional Sport Team: An Interview With Bill Yole, Social Media Coordinator and Webmaster of the ACT Brumbies Super Rugby Franchise

Abstract

Bill Yole is the social media coordinator and webmaster for the ACT Brumbies Super Rugby team. This interview covers Yole's role with the club, including the day-to-day social media operations at the Brumbies and how content creation is key to the engagement of fans locally and internationally. This is particularly vital to Yole's role because of the Brumbies' international exposure through competing in Super Rugby, which is played in seven nations, and the number of representative players in national teams alongside several of the Brumbies players' having heritage in the Pacific Islands. Yole also discusses how he took advantage of opportunities during his studies to secure full-time employment after he completed his sports media degree at the University of Canberra.

Like it or not? The differences between and success factors of sports providers' use of social networking sites

“…The high post frequency of Korfball Flanders and Gymnastics Federation Flanders are due to the final national championship games within their sports branch. As stated by social media coordinator Bill Yole, it is not exceptional that the frequency of posts rises during 'game days' as a result of the continuous live updates (Sharpe et al, 2017). Nevertheless, taken into consideration that their post popularity is not high, their post frequency crosses the line of too many updates, in all probability, but in their post frequency group there are also SFs who have posted up to 'only' 30 times.…”

“…Also, each platform requires a proper content marketing strategy. Facebook, for example, requires a different approach than Twitter or Instagram does [Sharpe et al, (2017), p.320] "… and there is no point putting a picture of lots and lots of text, which is what a news story often is, on Instagram". Maybe if they do opt for both Facebook and Twitter, there is a chance they neglect one platform.…”

“…Maybe if they do opt for both Facebook and Twitter, there is a chance they neglect one platform. Having two platforms requires constant monitoring and updating, which is not easy for many non-profit organisations to manage, since they do not have the budget to employ a social media coordinator (Sharpe et al, 2017).…”

“…First, studies have not yet investigated the impact of the use of other SNSs on Facebook's post popularity. Sharpe et al (2017) point out that each SNS needs a tailored approach and managing multiple pages is time consuming. However, it is evident that customers or fans, based on their personality (Hughes et al, 2011) and profession (Santana and Hopp, 2016), do not always prefer Facebook as their primary SNS.…”