Oregon State University incorporated real-time, interactive social media displays into a Web page on its football signing day to boost engagement and build brand identification via a platform employed in professional sports leagues. 

?The marketing of college sports needs to engage fans in real-time,? said said Elaine Feeney, CEO of Wayin. ?Universities need to react when their star athlete makes a game-changing play, their team wins a big game or their coach makes an important announcement. 

?Those responsible for marketing these teams need to be able to jump on those moments immediately,? she said. ?Additionally, college sports teams are doing more than just recruiting athletes, they?re creating communities and culture.

?Social media microsites are a great way to help attract fans and students from everywhere to keep the community growing and engaged.?

Oregon State also uses a similar interactive site to engage fans on game day.

Using Wayin allowed marketers to quickly gather relevant social posts throughout signing day and present them to their target audience in one location. 

Anything tweeted or posted to Instagram using a variety of hashtags was pulled into the site along with news and background information about each recruit.

The site served as a way for fans to receive all of the information they were looking for about new recruits throughout signing day in one location. 

Wayin made it easy for OSU to quickly find, moderate and deliver the most relevant and important conversations and content happening in social media back to OSU?s owned online properties.?

Sites like OSU?s make it easy to market real-time moments by displaying them in an interactive way. The sites are also able to monitor what fans are saying on social media and aggregate it in one place.

The site served as a way to encourage fans to post using certain hashtags to have their content appear on the page.

Some United States college teams are implementing mobile fan-engagement programs on a level rivaling professional sports organizations, but whether the collegiate teams actually catch the pros is open to question. 

Colleges are using a variety of mobile approaches, from Apple?s iBeacon technology to Xycast?s personal data receiver, to engage supporters, against a backdrop of mobile programs used at professional stadiums. Sports clubs recognize that spectators expect a fully immersive in-game experience due to mobile?s power to connect them almost instantly with a full range of services and products.

For decades, the college campus has served both the commercial and academic worlds as a proving ground for ideas. In recent years, US higher-education institutions also have been used to test mobile innovation because of their mobile-savvy communities.

?The college sports audience lives on social platforms and mobile devices,? Ms. Feeney said. ?With Wayin, Oregon State is able to reach this audience on the sites they visit with their mobile device, and encourage them to interact on the sites they?re already using. 

?This completely changes the way fans are able to interact with their favorite teams by putting it in real-time and allowing for personalized, mobile engagement.??