NeuLion College’s New Tool Makes Social Marketing Easier

Many of the most recognizable brands in college sports distribute their communications through NeuLion College’s publishing tools. Customers use the Titan content management system to post to the team website, mobile app, and/or email lists.

Now, with SocialDirect, NeuLion College users can also post to team social media accounts right from within Titan.

NeuLion College’s Director of Product Innovation Mark Hodgkin believes that people already familiar with using Titan will pick up SocialDirect fairly quickly and easily.

“SocialDirect is embedded completely into the Titan content management system, which is what we use to control all our digital offerings, mobile apps, and ticketing/donor platforms,” Hodgkin said. “So, it’s kind of baked right in there as a standalone tool, but also embedded into a bunch of the most common workflows.

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“If you’re creating an article or uploading a video or photo and you want to share it right away, hit save, and it takes you right into the SocialDirect flow using the link that the system creates — putting it right there for Bitly to shorten. You can also put a photo in there, sending it natively to the social platforms, while the program takes the headline and gives the photo a suggested caption.”

While social media has not traditionally been the biggest component of NeuLion’s products in the past, this seems like the logical next step for its CMS, as Hodgkin can attest to.

“It’s not our overall core-business focus of being a social aggregator,” he said. “We just tried to make Titan as robust a content distribution tool as possible. So, instead of having 40 different tabs open on your browser, digital managers and SIDs are now able to do it in one place.”

To say the least, this tool can save an athletic communications office precious time in getting all content to the proper channels very quickly.

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“There’s less of the copy-and-pasting and uploading photos,” said Hodgkin. “The photos you’re going to use are already in the system. Once they’re in the system, you could use them for articles, ad spaces, or post to SocialDirect.”

One of the big differences between SocialDirect and other similar tools out there is that there is no limit on the amount of Twitter or Facebook pages that can be associated with an account. As athletic departments often have many different handles or pages for the different sports or staff members, this makes getting content where it needs to be even easier. Those accounts will still operate on a permissions basis, though, so anyone who does not have the login credentials for a specific account will not be able to publish.

Users can also submit posts in an approval queue, allowing for a scenario where, say, a student worker can create a post to be distributed on Twitter and Facebook, submit it as a draft, and an SID can review it and publish later.

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SocialDirect also has Bitly integration, enabling the posting of custom URLs — if the school has one — very easy. The feature also works on NeuLion’s mobile app, making publishing on-the-go much easier.

Simply put, like much of what NeuLion College has launched, this is yet another product perfectly tailored for college sports communicators.

“We’ve added several people to our team recently who are either former SIDs or directors of marketing at colleges around the country,” Hodgkin said. “So, we wanted to have people on our team who have been in the seats of these schools and can relate to what they deal with beyond just a normal technology.”