BRAND DEVELOPMENT
Over the past few months, I have led the Galway United Social Media content creation team and I am currently responsible for the match day media co-ordination too. Duties here include the creation of content through graphics, images, and videos, editing video footage; Pitching ideas to the board at Galway United F.C. on how to attract new followers and create excitement around our club, particularly on Match-days; measuring social media engagement and trends, and keeping all social media platforms updated throughout a match-day.
We have created a long term, flexible and consistent brand for Galway United F.C., below are some examples of the branding we are using in 2021, more to come soon as the season progresses!
Animated crest created for Galway United F.C. [2022]
OVERSEEING CONTENT ON MATCHDAY
Match preview, the day before the game. This requires a lot of organisation, contacting relevant parties within the club such as manager John Caulfield for his thoughts on opinions, making sure and the information in the preview itself is relevant, professional and grammatically correct, along with this we also include appropriate and consistent imagery through an accompanying graphic to get fans more engaged in comparison to just posting a link to our site.
The match day versus video is important and helps build a little bit of hype before big match days, made using a combination of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects this piece consistently performs well and gets fans engaged with energetic and professional club branding online. I have a great understanding of how important the creation of through text, image and video is when it comes to engaging followers in sports media.
We create match day videos narrated by club legend Bernie O'Connell as gaelige to help promote our Irish language, as we are the only team in the world who are based in a Gaeltacht.
I started incorporating pre-match warm up videos to help build that hype aswell, and gives fans that behind the scenes access that they are missing due to Covid-19. These videos are colour graded and implemented into our club brand.
The match day lineup graphic is absolutely essential to any brand's presence online. It is the final piece before the kick off, it's regularly shared by fans and journalists etc.. it is a good opportunity to show some flair while also showing the appropriate information, at Galway United, I managed to create automated lineups for match days, so every single dimension is automatically updated and exported in the click of a button
Examples of some of the dimensions in which we use the automated line-up graphics, done via Adobe Photoshop
When it comes to the match itself we have three key videos, we use these as placeholders while we are still gathering players for photoshoots in the pre-season.
Galway United is the only club in world football who is situated in a Gaeltacht and we decided to incorporate this in our socials in 2021, not just for Seachtain na Gaelige but long term.
These short looping videos are nice exciting pieces of content for fans during the game and offer something different to plain text updates
This is an example of one of the lineup videos we post right before kick off, accompanying the lineup graphics mentioned above. These were made using a combination of Adobe programmes and help the fans have a deeper understanding of the XI that we are starting along with creating some more hype around kick off.
Kick Off, Substitute and Goal videos. Below is an example of one of the goal GIFs for a player
We are also starting to introduce live interviews on match days, which will develop further over the coming weeks as the equipment is being ordered. Here is a short clip from one of our interviews at HT against Bohemians recently. This is all produced and posted on match days. Editing video footage from live feeds is important to capture & highlight memorable moments and engaging experiences for fans.
Of course we have the standard HT and FT graphics, it's important that we also keep our brand consistent through this, I also exported these through Canva so anybody on the match day media team can fill in.
To finish up match day content we compile a round-up for each game known as the match report to be posted across various platforms with an accompanying graphic. Within this we also ask the manager John Caulfield for his thoughts on the game and link to the next set of matches.
