When someone says the name University of Kentucky basketball, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? 7 National Championships, all time winningest program , tradition, Adolph Rupp, Twitter… wait, did I just say Twitter?
That’s right, these days it almost seems like whenever people talk about UK, the famed micro-blogging site is involved somehow.
For instance, a rumor started to spread around today that John Wall, the #1 player in the nation according to Rivals.com, had committed to play basketball for Kentucky.
Within mere moments after the first “Wall” tweet, the snowball had begun to roll. Soon the term “John Wall” was a top 5 trending topic on Twitter. (For those of you who don’t know what a trending topic is, it’s one of the hottest 10 topics being discussed at that given time.)
Less than one month ago, April 23rd to be exact, newly appointed UK coach John Calipari started a Twitter account. Fast forward to May 19th and he has 58,519 followers, as of 9:35 in the morning. Just doing some basic math tells me that Coach Cal gets 2,000+ followers… daily. That’s just insane.
Coach Cal updates his Twitter accounts with daily “feel good” messages as well as various trips he’s going on, for example he was at the Penguins game last night in Pittsburgh with Ben Roethlisberger and Mario Lemieux among others.
To further engage the UK fanbase Coach Cal has even had two separate giveaways just for Twitterers. The first was autographed “Witness” shirts from Lebron James, a personal friend of the coach. The second was autographed shirts from the coach himself to every 1,000th follower.
Sure, lots of people think Twitter is useless, but you can’t deny the fact that it is probably the best and quickest way of getting the word out… and today the word is UK basketball is back.
