ESPN Wants You to Stop Following

I've mentioned that I enjoy observing how big brands communicate. That's especially true for how brands use Twitter. I'll express my appreciation for Twitter in another post - for now, let's take a look at an interesting decision made by ESPN and how they went about implementing a particular change.

Like most mega media companies, ESPN has lots of different Twitter accounts. One that I particularly enjoy following is their account that's dedicated to sharing their college football content. Rather, the account that used to share this content - @CFBLIVE.

On September 3rd, 2012, ESPN began the first steps of shutting this account down. Here's the Tweet that originally caught my attention:

Please unfollow this feed and follow @espncfb. Thank you — ESPN CFB LIVE (@CFBLIVE) March 24, 2013

Tweets that followed this post made no mention of college football.  Rather, all posts encouraged followers to move on. My thoughts:

• ESPN picked an interesting time (the opening weekend of the 2012-'13 season) to make this move.
• What was wrong with this account? Could it be that this Twitter profile name didn't include 'ESPN' in the handle?
• The 140-character limit aside, could ESPN be any more blunt in their request? And why haven't they closed that account?

I won't criticize ESPN much on that last point. The Twitterverse is still uncharted territory for the most part. There's not a lot of examples to go by in a situation like this. ESPN deserves credit for sticking to their plan though, as Tweets from @CFBLIVE continued to redirect followers as recently as last week, although these Tweets are getting less descriptive.

https://twitter.com/CFBLIVE/status/324800275586105344

What are your thoughts? I look forward to reading what you have to say about how ESPN handled this decision in the comments section!

UPDATE 1/25/2014: These embedded Tweets no longer appear nice and formatted because those Tweets have been deleted. It appears that ESPN had second thoughts on dumping the @CFBLive handle and deleted all Tweets that encouraged people to unfollow them. Very interesting!! Additionally, it looks like this feed is now heavy on SEC basketball coverage. Hmm...