Barstool Sports Social Media Management
In July 2024, I was selected to become the new admin for @quchicks, Quinnipiac’s Barstool affiliate for the girls. "Chicks at Barstool" is a female-focused content vertical within Barstool Sports, encompassing podcasts, blogs, and videos that offer unfiltered and unapologetic commentary on topics ranging from modern dating mishaps to the latest pop culture buzz The job entailed keeping up with campus news, trends, and gossip. Nearly every college in the United States and a few in Canada has a Barstool page and a Chicks page. The engagement was lower than I knew it could be across platforms so I set one major goal: get the Instagram account to 5,000 followers by the time I finish my time as admin. At the beginning, the Instagram account had 4,209 followers.
Process
When I got access to the account mid-July, I started thinking of easy trends I could do to gain traction. At first, my main target was the incoming class of 2028, a majority not following chicks. Around this time, the 2024 Summer Olympics were beginning and 2018 Women’s Rugby alum Ilona Maher was going viral on just about every platform for being for body positivity and just being relatable. This post alone gained hundreds of followers in just one day.
Hopping on the Ilona Maher rise to fame was a strategic move as she later went on to compete on Dancing with the Stars where she gained even more attention.
A series of posts that got people interacting, following, and keeping up with chicks was my Bachelor/Bachelorette series. This is a popular series of posts that Chicks/Barstool admins incorporate into their pages where students can submit themselves or their friends in a bracket-style competition based on voting on the Instagram story.
By inviting @qubarstool, an account with 23K followers, to collaborate on each post, the series gained a lot of traction and I got about 20-30 eligible bachelors/bachelorettes submitted in the Google Form in the bio. Every day, about 1,500 people would vote via the story. To put that into perspective, Quinnipiac has about 8,000 undergraduates, meaning almost 25% of the student body kept up with this series.
By the end of the Bachelorette series, the account had 5,466 followers. What does this mean for my original 5,000 follower goal? Obviously move that up to 6,000 followers!
