Twitter and Facebook would appear to be great channels for sports brands to provide event/game updates – but many brands are making a posting mistake that is really baffling to understand.

Managers of the accounts have three choices when it comes to posting event/game updates:
1. Post the start and finish (we’ve chosen this route on our racing clients)
2. Post the start and some form of timed updates (ie quarterly, at Half, etc.)
3. Post throughout the entire event start to finish. (@KyleBusch does a great job of this on race day)

What’s amazing is the number of accounts that forget an important piece of the puzzle – THE FINISH. Admittedly we don’t get the attraction of following a play-by-play on Twitter when you could follow on TV, radio, or even online at more detailed outlets – but if you’re going to make posts at the start of games why in the world would you just randomly stop and not even post the final outcome?

We’re huge fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but unfortunately we’ll be using them as a prime example from yesterday’s contest vs. the Tennessee Titans as what not to do. On the home page of www.Steelers.comyou’ll find callouts for – the Steelers Official Facebook & Steelers Digest on Twitter (they even include a feed for this – also interesting why they don’t have their own official Twitter account?).

After starting the game with ongoing updates they both for some random reason shut down at the following points in the game:

www.Facebook.com/Steelers: at 10:47 left in the game

http://twitter.com/SteelersDigest: at 14:49 left in the game

We see this all the time, especially on Twitter – from NFL to NCAA to tennis to golf to auto racing. Once you start down the path of continuous updates during an event, you can’t just decide to randomly stop and not even post the final result. Unless you’re 100% committed to the continuous posting strategy, the choice should be a simple two post strategy – start and finish. Otherwise you’re just risking pissing off your fans.