CCU learning impact of national championship

Coastal Carolina University is just starting to learn the impact of its College World Series championship.

While the impact on enrollment will take longer to determine, the immediate impact of website traffic, social media engagement and merchandise sales have been assessed, and it’s all good news for the university.

University communications Vice President Bill Plate presented the school’s finding to the board of trustees on Thursday.

Between May of 2016 and July 18, Facebook likes increased 43 percent to more than 40,500 likes, and Twitter follows increased 26 percent to 10,276 followers. But “likes” and “follows” aren’t the only important measurement that the university is using to measure the impact that the win has had on their social media profiles.

“When corporations started using social media as a communications strategy, in the beginning, it was all about ‘lets get as many people liking our page, get as many people we can to follow our page,’” said Plate. “The measure that we use more commonly now is engagement. Engagement is any time that somebody on social media talks about, communicates with our official channels. If you liked our page, that’s considered engagement. If you post or retweet something that we’ve done, it’s engagement.”

From May 2016 through July 18, Facebook comments increased by 29 percent and Twitter retweets increased by 74 percent.

“The more people that we have talking about the university the more it’s going to proliferate through social media,” said Plate. “With the increased engagement that revolved around the college world series, I don’t see that level continuing because there was a certain event that caused that to happen, but with that being said, we have a lot more people following our pages now.”

Plate said that social media is one of the main channels of communication the school uses to communicate and answer questions from students, parents and prospective students.

“There was already a part of our plan to start moving into additional areas where we know we can recruit students, so I think that where we saw the interest in the college world series are places where we feel like now that they know who we are, we’ll have a much better opportunity to start talking about who we are and our brand,” said Plate.

The impact of the school’s exposure hasn’t been limited to increased social media engagement. The win has also had a measurable monetary value.

Coastal Carolina University media mentions around the nation and world went from around 80 per week during the first week of April to more more than 5,000 mentions per week by the end of July. The total earned media value from April 1 to July 30 was over $190 million. The earned media value doesn’t include the live broadcast of the games.

“It’s not an exact science,” said Plate. “There’s a formula that they use to track if we had purchased an ad in this publication, the amount of space that the story took up, this is about approximately how much it would have cost for us to pay for that.”

The school also gained revenue from royalties and licensing fees.

Licensing fees during the second quarter of 2016, were $45,486, up 56 percent since the $29,088 collected in 2015. And royalties through June 2016 were $78,000, up 8 percent from under $73,000 during the same time period in 2015, but Plate told the board that he thinks the school hasn’t collected about 70 percent of the royalties from the College World Series.

Athletic Director Matt Hogue said the school’s athletic website has also benefited.

“We’re up almost 600 percent in terms of page views, almost 800 percent in terms of unique visitors to our site compared to where we were this time last year,” he said. “What it means to our university is probably immeasurable when you look at the amount of people nationally and even globally who have interacted with and been attracted to our university through this accomplishment. It helps us complete what our strategy and our plan is, which is to expand our brand, reach out to new student enrollment markets and possibilities and tell the great story that’s always been happening here.”

This story was originally published August 12, 2016 at 7:01 PM with the headline "CCU learning impact of national championship."