The Wayne State football team had an amazing, record-breaking season this year. It was the first time our team it made the playoffs in the program's 94-year history! These boys were hungry and they proved this by making it all the way to national championship.

It sadly ended when Pittsburg State (Kan.) beat us in the Division II national championship (opens new window). Regardless of the loss, it put our team on the map.

I help monitor the social media for Wayne State and I was overwhelmed by the amount of support that flooded in over the last few months. Of course there was a lot of support from our student body but I was impressed by all the tweets from alums or ex-employees.

A lot of the time I help students with various issues, field complaints. With the football team's recent success, however, I saw nothing but positive and encouraging tweets. There were many mentions of #warriorpride (opens new window) and it make me proud to be part of this community.

Tweets during the game

Below is a Wordle of the tweets that were sent during the game. This includes both WSU and Pitt State mentions. As you can see, Warrior pride dominated the twitter mentions.

Insight in to the tweets

Below is a graph of tweets that mentioned Wayne State football. We know that Twitter is a great source for trending events and we're pleasantly surprised to see so many real time tweets about the games. As you can see below, as we moved through the championship games our mentions skyrocketed. At one point we had three different trending phrases (opens new window) in Detroit.

Some statistics

• 1,800+ football related tweets on championship game day
• 900+ people liked or commented on our game day Facebook status
• 18,000+ person reach for our game day Facebook status updates
• 15,000+ click-throughs on all football related tweets
• 325 new Twitter followers during the championship games

The support continued even after the loss. I think our recent success has raised morale around here and everyone is carrying their head a little higher, proud to be a Wayne State Warrior.

A few tweets after the game

http://twitter.com/#!/midwestguest/statuses/148395941609734144

http://twitter.com/#!/coheednsambria/statuses/148235182950985729