Covering Duke in the Final Four

Written By Morgan Moushon

The buzzer rang and fate was sealed; Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill would face off for the first time ever in the NCAA tournament.

For anyone not from North Carolina or thoroughly invested in college basketball, this was a HUGE deal. The two schools are located eight miles apart and the rivalry is fierce.

As Duke’s current social media manager, Carolina’s former social media manager and a Carolina alumna - I couldn’t have been more excited. But it was time to get to work. I had four days to pull together a social media strategy for the most historic basketball matchup of all time.

Leading up to the game

My first step was to write a social media communications plan to get down on paper my goals, objectives, audiences, key messages and deliverables for this large-scale event.

My biggest challenge going into this “campaign” was that the Duke University account is not the athletics account. The DukeMBB account would cover the players and team. It was my job to showcase everything the basketball account would not — students, fans, alumni, campus and community pride.

At this point the game was still a week away, but I wanted to capitalize on our audience’s buzz and excitement. I worked with the larger team to develop a unique piece of content for each day of the week. Some of my favorite posts that I created leading up to the game included:


Collaborating with Carolina

While Duke and Carolina are rivals on the court, the two world-class universities are also strong collaborators off it. As part of the social media strategy, one of my objectives was to use this moment to educate our audience about the partnerships between the two schools.

I set up a meeting with our team and my former colleagues down the road and we brainstormed tons of great ideas. These are the three that came to fruition:

8 miles of collaboration video

This video highlighted the fact that the two schools are located eight miles apart and while we're competitors on the court, we're also collaborators in the world. The video paired with a longer story sharing eight examples of ways Duke and UNC work together.

Twitter thread

I am a big proponent of repurposing content. Creating social media content is time consuming so I wanted to be sure the content we were creating could also be used multiple times in various formats.

I worked with the UNC team to create a back and forth twitter thread sharing the eight partnership examples and also turned those examples into an interactive trivia game on Instagram stories.

House Divided

Because Duke and Carolina are so close together many homes have divided loyalties, including mine. I thought it would be fun to share these stories from our audience.

I put out a request using the question sticker inside Instagram stories to gather submissions. And our audience didn’t disappoint. We got a ton of fun answers that were then turned into a longer story and shared across social media as well as repurposed into an Instagram story.

Live from New Orleans

I was fortunate to get to travel and continue covering Duke live from New Orleans. My goal in New Orleans was to showcase fan’s pride for Duke, both on site and back on campus in Durham. I also had the last minute idea of direct messaging a few prominent Duke alumni and got a response from Ken Jeong who very kindly offered to film a good luck video for the team. To date, this is Duke’s best performing Reel with over 172,000 impressions.

A plan B

Of course with every sporting event you have to have a worst case scenario plan. Duke did end up losing to Carolina in the Final Four game. I ended my Instagram story of the day’s events with a video clip of Coach K walking off the court for the very last time, and then we went silent on social media. There was nothing else to say.

The next morning, I shared a video that the team put together of students thanking Coach K for all he’s done for the university.

There was even more

While everything I listed above is a lot of social media content, there was even more. In addition to what you read about above we also created a social media toolkit with wallpapers, new giphy stickers and Zoom backgrounds, and multiple sights and sounds videos including students lined up for lottery tickets, the team send off, Duke President Vincent E. Price wishing the team good luck, student send off and fans in the Big Easy.

I also repurposed a lot of the content above into Instagram stories which you can view by clicking the March Madness highlight on Duke’s Instagram.

How everything performed

While we weren’t able to share all the fun celebratory posts we had planned, I was still proud of the vast amount of social media content created in just a few days time. And it all performed incredible.

  • 160 posts

  • 3.1 million impressions

  • 2.2 million people reached

  • 102,00 reactions

  • 106,000 forms of engagement

  • 610,000 video views

  • 3,800 new followers across all platforms

Morgan Moushon
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