USC Twitter account rides Final Four run to viral stardom

Hours before the Gamecocks faced second-seeded Duke in the NCAA basketball tournament’s second round, USA Today pushed out a story with a grim headline: “Duke’s path to the Final Four looks ridiculously clear with Villanova’s loss.”

The now-infamous tweet found its way to C.J. Lake, who saw an opportunity. The University of South Carolina’s 25-year-old social media mastermind took a screenshot and saved a link to the story, just in case.

When the Gamecocks upset Duke later that night for their first trip to the Sweet 16, Lake fired back with a playful barb on USC’s official Twitter account, quoting the newspaper’s prediction with a simple reply: “Oops.”

The post rocketed to viral fame, picking up more than 10,000 retweets and inspiring online stories from People Magazine and SBNation.com, among others.

And that was far from an aberration. Under Lake, USC’s social media accounts have focused on engaging current and prospective students and alumni.

Out with the stream of press releases, and in with the conversation.

It’s an approach that has helped USC surf a wave of Final Four hype, capitalizing on the Gamecocks’ basketball success with a flurry of gifs, videos, graphics and, yes, plenty of snarky comebacks to detractors.

“Our audience has an appetite for humor,” said Lake, who graduated USC in 2014 and was hired a year ago to run the school’s social media accounts. “They have an appetite for brands that will speak to their level. So we’ve tried to mess around with that a little bit, and we’ve seen some pretty good success.”

In the past three weeks, USC has responded to a shout-out from Lil Wayne, a rapper with more than 29.5 million Twitter followers, by tweeting some of his own song lyrics back at him.

The university has posted videos of students celebrating past midnight on campus – and, in one case, featured a Snapchat video of a student wearing a chicken mask.

It uses words like “shook,” “lit,” and “sauce,” and few tweets are sent without the appropriate emoji. (Lake says her “little focus group” – her little sister and nieces – keep her up to date on the latest lingo).

The strategy has paid off. In the past three weeks, USC’s three main social media channels – Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat – have reached more than 19.5 million viewers – nearly 10 times as many as usual – and picked up more than 8,700 new followers.

Social media users’ engagement with USC has nearly quadrupled over the past year, some of that due to a video USC released last August quizzing some of its top professors – and President Harris Pastides – on “millennial vocabulary.”

Lake says nowadays she wakes up to text messages from friends who notice when USC’s Twitter account is praised by national news outlets. She chuckled at People Magazine’s reference to USC’s “social media team,” noting it’s just her and two interns.

“That was me in my bed, eating Cheetos and drinking hot tea,” she said, laughing.

This story was originally published March 31, 2017 at 2:42 PM with the headline "USC Twitter account rides Final Four run to viral stardom."