This blog has taught me many valuable principles in social media strategies. It has allowed me to experience first-hand the direct effects of social media on personal content. Lackluster promotion, which I am proficient at maintaining, will only result in a failed experiment as the world lives online nowadays and you must meet your audience where they are.

Twitter proved to be my favorite social media platform for engaging with my audience. Through the use of polls and retweets I felt as though I was engaging in meaningful conversation and also being validated when people engaged with me. For the live election coverage, we were able to maintain a steady stream of engagement because of our timely updates and well-edited content. This is one example of how I should have worked to improve my personal site and mimic the experience of the live election coverage.

I saw very little results with Facebook, yet somehow it was the main referral to my blog site. This was strange because I had very few engagements on Facebook analytics, but WordPress showed it as my highest contributor. Nevertheless, I know my Facebook strategies were ineffective and in the future I should focus on creating more visually engaging posts that have fewer verbiage.

Overall, I learned many of the things I should not do to create a successful social media presence. With more consistency in my posting I can create an environment where my viewers rely on me for information constantly. My content and engagement also need to be more creative as my topic was rather bland and is not likely to draw a large audience long-term, and I should have included more polls and comments within my pages to create a conversation for viewers. In the future I will be sure to maintain consistency and creativity to promote my content.

The University of Tennessee is readily equipping a group of students for a career in live television production.

VFL Films, a production department at the university, employs around thirty students that work key roles in the production of the Vols’ home games. The students, most of whom have little prior production experience, run jobs such as camera operator, replay operator, audio technician, and associate director for ESPN, SEC Network, and online broadcasts of every home sporting event through the year. The students gain invaluable experience in a competitive field, and the university can maintain its own production team as opposed to freelancing for every event.

The University of Tennessee played host to Colton Underwood, the most recent contestant on “The Bachelor”, on Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at a home baseball game.

Underwood’s season on the “The Bachelor” ended in March, and he visited Tennessee’s campus to promote his charity for children with cystic fibrosis during a midweek baseball game versus in-state opponent Lipscomb University. While on campus, Underwood worked closely with VFL Films as he held a media availability in the departments studio, and visited the commentators booth during the televised broadcast of the game.

The University of Tennessee’s sports media department is one of the best at producing jaw-dropping content, for every sport, that fans will eat up.

From the big money sports of basketball and football, to the niche sports of track and tennis, a Vol fan will never run out of quality content.

Most of the sports interconnect with one another in the way they use their media content.

Take for example this nationally praised hype video for the upcoming UT basketball season, that made its debut on a jumbotron in front of 100,000 football fans.

This video was the talk of all the towns when it was released, and left most of those who watched it with goosebumps… even if they were not UT fans.