This past weekend marked the sixth year in a row Gossip Genie has covered the National ProStart Invitational (NPSI) live on social media. This is the third year in a row Elizabeth and I have attended. The Invitational, held in Grapevine, Texas this year, consisted of two days of intense culinary and restaurant management competitions.
The culinary competition tested the teams’ creative abilities as they prepared a three-course meal in 60 minutes and students competing in the management competition were tasked with developing a proposal for the next promising restaurant concept, which they presented to a panel of industry judges.
It was all on Gossip Genie to translate the excitement and energy of the 2-day event on social media so that the ProStart audience in attendance, and at home, could follow along with the competition.
Each year Elizabeth and I have covered NPSI, we have adapted our strategy to reflect the latest social media trends and to increase coverage of the event.
Here are a few things we included in our live updates this year:
Snapchat
The primary audience at this event is high-school age students. Since over 60 million of Snapchat’s 100 million daily users are between the ages of 13-24, we knew we had to be on Snapchat to reach this target demographic (Source: Social Media Examiner).
We created a custom filter for the event so that students in attendance could brand their own snaps with the NPSI logo and hashtag.
Take a look at our Snapchat story from Day 1 of the competition:
[KGVID]https://gossipgenie.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMG_5242.mov[/KGVID]Facebook Live
In previous years, there was a live stream hosted on ProStart’s website that we directed our audience to so that they could tune into the competition and the awards ceremony if they were not in attendance and wanted to cheer on their teams from home. This year, there was no live stream so we turned to Facebook Live to give our fans access to key events during NPSI, specifically the awards ceremony.
We went live on Facebook during the awards so that our audience could find out the NPSI winners in real time. The live video received over 3,000 views and close to 200 comments throughout the live stream congratulating the winners. It was a great way to engage people who couldn’t be at the event.
Twitter Updates
Twitter is a great platform to provide instantaneous live updates and we used this network to capture key moments, quotes and images from each team during the competitions and award ceremony. Twitter was also a great place to interact with students, educators, fans, and donors/sponsors of NPSI.
Live Stream Updates
For the second year in a row, we used Strea.ma to broadcast all social media surrounding NPSI. It collects all social media posts using the event hashtag, #NPSI2016, to bring to life the competition with real-time social media interaction on a big screen. We displayed the live feed on large screens right outside of the culinary and management competitions s so that people in attendance could follow along with all of the social media chatter.
