In the summer of 2018, I had the pleasure of interning at Love Sport Radio in London. I was placed in charge of their Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts and given creative freedom over what to do with them as long as I followed a few guidelines they had set for me.
More importantly, the 2018 World Cup was going on in Russia. As a result, our start-up station was teeming with activity for the entirety of my time in the UK. It helped that England was playing some great football as well.
It was an unforgettable opportunity. I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes of talk radio by shadowing producers and sound technicians and got to interact with a handful of British celebrities on a daily basis. Below, you can see some of the proudest moments from my experience abroad.
Social Media Strategy
As I stated above, I was given a lot of creative freedom over what to post on Love Sport’s social media channels. Aside from Tweets promoting our daily shows and advertisements, I was able to experiment with content using my own knowledge of social media. I posted about breaking news updates, memes and viral videos, and created contests and polls to boost user engagement.
The results of my experiment—Love Sport’s Twitter following just about doubled from roughly 2,200 to over 4,000 followers in my two months in London. To keep the momentum going, I created a report for the next intern on what worked and didn’t work in terms of driving traffic to our social media. The report included types of content to post, accounts to tag in Tweets, and peak times of day to Tweet. I can’t include the whole report here, but below is the result of my most successful Tweet (can’t give all my secrets away). Love Sport’s Twitter account now sits at over 6,000 followers, so it seems my advice has been helpful.
Ad Campaigns and Guest Promotions
I designed several graphics each day that I worked at love sport, serving many purposes from helping develop ad campaigns with our corporate partners to promoting on-air guest appearances.
The Unsung Heros campaign was a series of sponsored Tweets detailing the performance of underappreciated players at the World Cup each day of the tournament. A few of the images that I created for that series are below.
More example of sponsored Tweets included the Bet of The Day, 7 Best Bets, and a series of World Cup haircut polls shown below.
Additionally, I was in charge of creating graphics for celebrity guests appearing on air including (from top left) actor Blake Harrison, rapper Big Narstie, soccer legend Ledley King, and Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett.
Lastly, here’s a brief audio clip that I put together from an interview when the US President visited London and joined us in-studio.