The Art of Running a Lower League Twitter Account
“Twitter is like walking into a bar.”
This isn’t the set up to some sort of joke you’d hear at an open mic night. Those are the words of Nik Myles, the admin of the DeKalb County United Twitter account.
What does he mean by that? Why does it matter? Why does DeKalb act like such a dick sometimes on the site?
Well, there’s an art to it all.
Origins
To start, let’s talk about the man behind the account. Nik Myles, like most people who help run a lower league soccer club, is just a regular person. He’s got a job and a family and a life of his own. His story is an interesting one, though.
“I'm English. I've been over here for eight years,” said Myles. “I live out by O'Hare in Des Plaines, so I'm not a DeKalb native in any way, shape, or form. The day job is digital marketing, so Google ads and Facebook ads and all that stuff. As a result, I sit in front of the computer all day, so I'm in a good position to monitor our online profiles.”
Wait, wait, wait. The dude running the DeKalb account is an Englishman living in Des Plaines, a suburb that’s about an hour away? How does that even happen?
“My club in England is Tranmere Rovers, but I wasn't living in the location, so I became what is colloquially known as a ground hopper. I’d basically just go to random non-league games and just have a nice day out,” said Myles. “I came over here not knowing anything about the American soccer landscape and I wanted to continue doing that. I very quickly found out that it's not possible to do that because the infrastructure isn't there. As a result I was trying to write and continue my blogging by reaching out to people who were running soccer clubs. I found this club called Shockers, and they were doing match reports and all this stuff properly, and I thought they must be legit at some level.”
“I reached out to them, and it turns out it was John Hall's Sunday night rec league team. He was not a professional, but he was doing stuff better than professional teams. We arranged to meet up at a different game, and I was enjoying it, having a laugh at a bad pass or a bad shot. John took a shine to that and stored it in his memory banks,” said Myles. “Unbeknownst to me, he was already thinking about starting up a soccer club of his own and when it came to be a reality, he reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do the matchday announcing. He thought people would react to me, and they did. I did the announcing for a while, and I still do it, and then over time I got more and more ingrained in the online side of things and took over the social media account. Now I do the website and I do all the marketing and whatever else is needed.”
Having a Good Time
So that’s led us to where we are now. We’ve got an Englishman who’s willing to have some fun with the sport of soccer running the account of a local amateur side. What could go wrong?
For those of you who are more familiar with the Midwest Premier League, you’ll know about the specific nature of the DeKalb account. For those of you that don’t, let me try to explain it to you.
Do you have anyone in your life that you would describe as an “asshat”? Like they’re not an inherently mean or evil person, but every once in a while they’re just a bit of a dickhead? In a wholesome, loving way, of course.
That’s how the DeKalb county Twitter account tends to operate. They’re like that one sibling you have that you get sick of at times, but at other times you’re incredibly happy to have them around.
They’re in their prime when the season is going on and they can really have fun with opposing teams, but you don’t have to scroll too far down to find them poking fun at someone.
Why is DeKalb the way they are? Simply for the love of the game.
“I'd love to say that there's a strategy behind what we do here. There isn’t. This is non-league soccer. It's supposed to be fun, so I try to have fun as best I can. Iowa couldn't give a flying crap about us, so let's enjoy just hating on Iowa,” said Myles. “It's just me dicking about. My team back home is Tranmere Rovers in the 4th division, and you can't really say my club's the greatest in the world when you are losing 3-0 to Forest Green Rovers or something, but it’s fun. That ethos is kind of what carried over to what I do online. Let's just have fun with it. We're all volunteers, we can take it as seriously as we want, but the only thing we should be professional about is how we treat others.”
There’s obviously a reason for the madness. Making people laugh and providing some fun moments online is nice and all, but having that presence online is what matters.
“We've got a nine month offseason. If we just went dark at the start of August and then came back in May and said, ‘Hey, we're back. Can you buy some tickets please?’, people would ask why. We’d be no different than the latest blockbuster in cinemas or bowling alleys. We have to differentiate ourselves by being a part of this community.” said Myles. “I always say Twitter is like walking into a bar. There are already conversations going on, and if you just walk in and say ‘I'm selling some watches’, you just look like a conman. So if you walk in and say, ‘hello, we've got tickets to this game’, people don't care who you're talking to. You've got to build and nurture relationships. Sometimes it's private messaging, or replying and responding and retweeting things. Whatever it is, you've got to build those relationships so that when you say, ‘Hi, I'm selling some watches or some tickets’, people will trust you and trust your brand.”
DeKalb also uses an old-school approach to Twitter. Ever since the app was taken over by Elon Musk and they shifted to their Twitter Blue survive, plenty of accounts have turned their focus solely on driving views and engagement, no matter how bad the posts themselves are. That’s not how it used to be. Accounts used to prioritize having fun and being funny. Thankfully Myles is keeping that spirit alive.
“People think it's all about engagement and driving revenue and cost and all that nonsense, it isn't, not for me,” said Myles. “I do it because 9 times out of 10 I enjoy it or I think someone else on the other side will enjoy it. When I was blogging back in the UK, the most popular thing I ever posted was a picture of Arsène Wenger coming down a water slide on his summer vacation and I got hundreds of hits, thousands of hits.”
Plus, DeKalb’s also smart enough to not be stupid. While the different teams of the Midwest Premier League have their own separate goals, they’re still a collective that would like to see the league as a whole grow.
“Look, we have a yearly AGM (annual general meeting) where all the clubs get together. We're not interested in burning bridges and actually making ourselves priors. That's not what we're doing,” said Myles. “Most people get the joke, I hope. We haven't had enough negative feedback from rival clubs or Twitter users to say that they don't get the joke. So until John says otherwise, the tone's going to continue.”
The Other App
We often find ourselves in little bubbles on social media. We keep seeing the same things over and over again, and perception becomes reality. We forget that there’s stuff going on outside the bubble.
When I was talking to Myles, I was only thinking about how the club’s Twitter account can be used to grow the club’s influence. Then he mentioned Facebook and Instagram, which are actually as crucial for an area like DeKalb.
“Our fan base is very much more a Facebook and Instagram fanbase purely on the numbers of interactions and whatever else. So the content that goes on there is a little bit different and a little bit more locally focused, certainly on the Facebook side of things,” said Myles.
“The biggest thing that we do in the offseason, the long, cold, nine-month-long offseason is we give other agencies and organizations a platform. If the library is running a thing, if a charity is doing a thing, if there's a fun run, if a store is doing something, we will put that on our profile and talk about it regardless of whether or not they are a partner or a sponsor or even a friend of the club. A rising tide lifts all boats, right? So the biggest goal, if there is one, is for the club to be like a community hub. Our online home needs to be the focus of the community. ‘Did you see this thing that DeKalb posted?’ That's what we use Facebook for. Twitter is much more for dicking about.”
Imagine talking to your family at dinner versus talking to your friends on a night out. That’s the difference in tone between Facebook and Twitter.
Utilizing social media this way helps DeKalb grow, and the hope is that the lower-league soccer community in this country continues to grow as well.
“I live in Death Plaines, so to get over to DeKalb is about an hour and 15 minutes. With my British hat on, I should be driving past 60 or 70 sustainable clubs. Not all MLS or USL clubs, but community clubs, more than just youth soccer clubs that print out cash. That shouldn't be that hard,” said Myles. “So yeah, we would love it to be thousands of clubs in the locale because that cuts down on travel costs and it's easy to build rivalries.”
It wouldn’t be a DeKalb article if we didn’t get some shots in on their rivals, both past and present.
“Every now and again we mention the fact that we put clubs out of business. Aurora (Borealis) came and went and Rockford FC keeps on thinking about going and Dubuque came and went and whatever else. We always have a club in our sites that we would like to put out of business, tongue-in-cheek of course. Wherever there are rivalries, we try to fan the flames as best we can, be that Rockford, be that Steel City, be that even Edgewater. Steel City in Joliet, they're fun to pick on, and they pick on us. Rockford is the main one that we pick on, but they're in the second division, and it's the same with Edgewater, so they miss the cut.”
While their main rivals might be in the division below, here’s hoping DeKalb can make some more enemies in the first division this MWPL campaign.
All in good fun, of course.
- Adnan Bašić