Not only did LSU football crush the competition on the field this season, the team’s social media account dominated the internet.
The social media index and measurement platform reported LSU football had the most engagement of any NCAA program this season, according to MVPIndex. It generated 29 million likes, comments and shares across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The team’s accounts claimed nine of the top 10 most engaging social media posts from NCAA football teams this season, according to the index.
LSU football shared hype videos with its more-than-746,000 Instagram followers and 783,000 Twitter followers before every game this season. They included clips of team highlights, music and voice-overs performed by celebrities including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Tim McGraw and John Goodman.
LSU senior Will Stout edited and produced these videos weekly. Several of them accumulated over one million views.
Award-winning sportswriter and LSU digital sports media reporter Cody Worsham wrote scripts for the videos. He said the videos took off thanks to Stout’s work and the success of the team.
“I think the key to success is Will’s talent,” Worsham said. “The other key is the success of the football team. If we were 6-6 or 6-5, that video wouldn’t have as much of an impact. But they were doing so well.”
Many fans, including sports commerce junior James Connors, looked forward to the weekly videos in preparation for game days.
“I thought the LSU hype videos were a great representation of the culture of our university,” Connors said. “They were extremely entertaining and consistently gave me goosebumps and got me fired up for Saturdays.”
The two-to-three-minute videos gained the attention of both students and national media, alike. Sports Illustrated, ESPN, CBS Sports and other major sports media outlets featured stories about the videos.
Sports Illustrated even declared LSU the undisputed national champion of hype videos.
International trade and finance senior Owen Pollard said the team’s social media posts and videos are the best of any program in the nation.
“It definitely helped spread the LSU brand to people all across the country,” Pollard said. “My friends back home in Kentucky who aren’t even LSU fans became LSU fans because of those videos.”
Worsham said he felt the scripts and videos did a good job of connecting with everyone– including non-sports fans.
“My wife does not care about sports at all,” Worsham said. “She could maybe name one player on LSU’s team. But when I played the video of the Rock reading the script, she thought that was cool. It had that out-of-sports crossover appeal.”
The team celebrated its 42-25 national championship win over Clemson with a visit to the White House on Jan. 17. A video of several team members dancing to the “Get the Gat” challenge went viral on Twitter, accumulating over 4.3 million views as of Saturday, Jan. 25.
“As an Ohio State fan, it makes me uncomfortable to like this LSU team so much,” Twitter user @jeannathomas wrote.
as an Ohio State fan it makes me very uncomfortable to like this LSU team so much
— Jeañña (@jeannathomas) January 17, 2020
Click here for a full playlist of LSU’s 2019-2020 hype videos.
