The NHL team Montréal Canadiens is the longest continuously operating professional ice hockey team worldwide and has won the Stanley Cup more often than any other franchise. The team is frequently referred to in English and French as the Habs.
In early 2020, the Habs were forced to pause their activities during the COVID-19 lockdown. Once they were allowed to return to practice at the beginning of the summer, fans were still not permitted inside the stadium. To make things more interesting for both the team and the fans, the Habs launched the Twitter campaign #WelcomeHomeHabs.
Twitter campaign to connect with fanbase via a 10-foot screen
Professional sports rely hugely on the fans. Often, it’s the cheers from the audience that drive the players to their best performances. From June 23 until the end of the training camp, fans could tweet their messages of encouragement using the hashtag #WelcomeHomeHabs.
The Twitter feed was displayed on a massive 10-foot screen in the Habs’ home stadium, making it possible for players to see the motivational messages while training and bridging the gap between the fans and the players.
An incentive for using the Twitter hashtag
The aim was to fill the big stadium wall with great social media content, so the social media team incentivised the use of the hashtag. Each day, they offered a reward for the best tweet: a $25 voucher for the Habs fan shop.
Furthermore, the social feed was set to manual moderation, allowing the Habs social media team to hand-pick every single post that was displayed on that wall. This might seem like a lot of work, but sports is an emotional topic and full of subjective opinions. By manually moderating the Twitter feed, the social media team could make sure that only appropriate posts were shown.
It’s a well-known fact that quality user-generated content can be hard to get in most industries. But between the tweet selection process and the $25 reward, there was a lot of motivation for fans to publish good content. Incentivising good content is one of many ways to increase the quality and quantity of user-generated content.
The perfect design for a big-screen Twitter feed
Because the tweets were displayed on a giant 10-foot screen at the Bell Sports Complex, the design of the Twitter feed needed to fulfil specific requirements. It had to be easy to read from afar with regards to size, resolution and transition speed. Fortunately, the Walls.io Billboard theme covers all of that.
With the Billboard theme active, posts appear one after the other and in fullscreen, which is perfect for big screens and displays. Billboard displays posts with a comfortable size and transition speed so that viewers have enough time to read each post. The theme automatically adapts to any screen size and resolution so that the Twitter feed looks great on every screen.
The logo of Tricolore Sports, the fan shop operator and Habs sponsor, was integrated into the Twitter feed to give it a little extra exposure.
Turn your screen into a Twitter feed to connect to your audience
With Walls.io, it is super easy to add a logo of your choice and adapt the feed to your design needs. The Walls.io Style Editor is easy to use and intuitive — no coding skills necessary.
Featured image attribution: commons.wikipedia.org