International Collegiate Programming Contest

Digital Strategy Guide: Social Media and SEO

By: Sarah Johnson
 1

Table of Contents

Executive Summary 2

Online Reputation Analysis 2

The Value of Online Reputation Management 2
Google Search Audit 2
Twitter Influencers 3

Social Media Strategy 5

The Value of Social Media Marketing 5
ICPC social media audit 5
Social Listening 9
How to Listen 9
Keyword Optimization 10
Competitors 11
Social Media Goals, Objectives, and KPIs 11
Recommendations 11

SEO Audit 12
The Value of SEO 12
Technical SEO Audit 12
Recommendations 15

Conclusion 16

Summary of Recommendations 17
 2

Executive Summary

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is the oldest, largest, and most
prestigious programming contest in the world. The goal of this digital strategy guide is to help
the ICPC reach its stated goals of shining the light on the brightest collegiate programmers
while also maintaining and increasing donations from corporate sponsors. An online reputation
analysis, social listening, and a technical SEO audit and usability report uncovered opportunities
for growth within each of these areas. These opportunities include:
● Implementation of an achievable social media strategy that focuses on engaging with
corporate sponsors and boosting content engagement outside of the world finals period
● Active online monitoring of both ICPC and competitors through maintaining dashboards
to track mentions and sentiment and creating a list of keywords to implement in
website content and track in web searches
● Technical changes to ICPC’s website to remove duplicate content and optimize HTML
tags

Online Reputation Analysis

The Value of Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management is the practice of taking inventory of the online conversation
surrounding your brand and using the data gathered to take action. Online reputation
management is an important step in creating internal brand awareness to inform strategies
that allow your brand to control the conversation. While online reputation management can be
realized in a variety of ways, I analyzed the ICPC through a Google search audit and an analysis
of valuable Twitter followers followed with strategies to effectively leverage their influence.

Google Search Audit

I first performed an audit of the first 50 Google search results for the phrase, “International
Collegiate Programing Contest.” The search was conducted through a Virtual Private Network
(VPN) in a signed-out browser to ensure that location and past browsing history would not
affect the results. The data collected from the first 50 results included: title on the search
engine results page (SERP), link, media status (owned, controlled, or 3rd party), a summary of
findings and their meaning, the sentiment, and actions to take. Find an example of the layout
below and a link to the full analysis ​here​.
 3

Of the first 50 results, 18 were positive, 26 were neutral, and six were negative. The majority of
content, 42 results, were from third-party websites like university websites, five were from
owned websites like ICPC’s website, and two were from controlled media websites like ICPC’s
Facebook. It is preferable to have ICPC’s owned media rank first and frequently in search results
to ensure that ICPC can control the messaging around search results that involve your brand.

The biggest findings from the Google search audit include:

● Websites are mostly 3rd party, and few of ICPC’s owned or controlled mediums rank.
● The majority of websites were about regional qualifying contests hosted by universities.
● ICPC’s social media platforms did not rank well. Facebook didn’t appear in the top 50,
and Instagram ranked as number 44.

Recommendations stemming from these findings include:

● Consider leveraging partnerships with universities and encourage them to link to your
direct website from their websites
● Implement keywords on different pages of your website so they rank for the search
term, “International Collegiate Programing Contest.” You want your pages to show up
so you control the information.
● Include a link on your website to the ​Forbes article​, search result 39, about ICPC as it is a
high-value link that will help your page rank higher.
● There is a ​research article​, “A retrospective overview of International Collegiate
programming contest data,” that appears three times in the top 50 results and
aggregates information about past contestants that could be valuable for incentivizing
sponsors.

Twitter Influencers

ICPC’s twitter is a valuable online community that offers ample opportunities for partnerships
and controlling the messaging around ICPC. Below are 10 influential accounts that follow ICPC.
Of ICPC’s top 10 influential followers, four are universities, three are industry professionals, and
 4

three are organizations in the industry. The following criteria were used to determine ICPC’s
influential Twitter followers:
● At least 100 tweets to show they are active on Twitter
● Number of followers
● High follower to following ratio (followers divided by following) to ensure perceived
credibility by others outside of their immediate circle or online community
● Tweeted at least once in 2019
● Relevant to ICPC’s work/could help promote ICPC’s work

Followe
Handle Name Abbreviated Description Followers r Ratio
Никола
й
Никифо Chairman of the Board of Directors @Diginavis,
@nnikiforov ров Professor @InnopolisU 442372 305.29
Peking
@PKU1898 University Peking University 131658 689.31
MIT's largest research lab, the Computer
@MIT_CSAIL MIT CSAIL Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab. 113913 6.55
Open source, code patterns, tutorials & a
@IBMDeveloper IBM Developer global coding community. 96708 2.42
Universidade
@UPorto Porto University of Porto official Twitter 83602 1306.28
Ignacio Mathematician and Professor at Universidad
@MantillaIgnacio Mantilla Prada Nacional de Colombia 74747 124.58
Association for
Computing ACM is the world's largest educational and
@TheOfficialACM Machinery scientific computing society. 49679 77.02
CodeChef is a way to challenge and engage the
@codechef CodeChef developer community. 23818 212.66
@UNRoficial UNR Universidad Nacional de Rosario. 22941 57.93
Developer Advocacy at @JetBrains and host of
@hhariri Hadi Hariri @TalkingKotlin. 22227 21.01
Table 1: ICPC’s influential Twitter followers.

Strategies for engaging with these valuable influencers include:

● Interact with their tweets by retweeting, favoriting, and commenting from ICPC’s
Twitter.
 5

● Reach out to these influencers, especially the universities, and let them know when you
are running a campaign or trying to promote a regional contest in their area.
● Ask industry questions that can be answered succinctly and mention these influencers in
your tweets.
● Create a tweet, blog post, or dedicate a page of your website to the top 10 influencers
in the industry and mention the influencers highlighted above.
● Offer incentives, like ICPC swag (shirts, hats, etc…) or hints about the next world finals
destination, if they help spread your messaging or tweet about you

Social Media Strategy

The Value of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing adds value to any company as it allows companies to control their
messaging, build brand identity and trust, interact directly with users, and eventually increase
goal conversions all for free.

ICPC social media audit

For the purposes of this digital strategy, I analyzed the ICPC’s presence and posts across
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Twitter

ICPCNews has 16.3K followers on Twitter and 6,940 tweets with an average of 7.3
engagements. I analyzed new tweets created, not retweeted, by the ICPC. The chart below
shows the top 10 tweets with the most engagement. Twitter engagement was defined as
favorites plus retweets. Three of the top 10 tweets are from 2017, two are from 2018, and five
are from 2019. All of the top tweets occurred during the world finals contest period in each
year. Nine of the top ten have a photo and seven use ICPC hashtags like #ICPC2019. Seven of
the top 10 tweets are photos of the winning team from that year. The only tweet in the top ten
without a photo announces the winners of the 2019 world finals. Two of the top tweets show a
photo that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the contest. In summary, the most engaged with
tweets include:
● Photos
● Hashtags
● Behind-The-Scenes content
 6

Figure 1: ICPC’s top 10 tweets during the 2016-2019 world finals contest periods.

Below are examples of successful tweets by the ICPC.

Next, to investigate the types of content generated by ICPC ​outside​ of the world finals contest
months, I excluded tweets from the months of March, April, and May as all ICPC finals from
2016-2019 were held during these months. Engagement decreases by hundreds of favorites
 7

and retweets outside of the contest period. The most engaged with tweet had 116
engagements and announced the 2019 world finals location. Popular tweet types included:
● Tweets with photos or videos, included in eight of the top 10 tweets
● Coder or team spotlights
● Tweets with themed hashtags like #WisdomWed or #MotivationMonday.

Figure 2: ICPC’s top 10 tweets outside of the 2016-2019 world finals contest periods.

The ICPC had 28 tweets about their sponsors with 3.9 average engagements for these tweets.
Tweets about sponsors were determined by filtering tweets that contained the word “sponsor”
and manually coding tweets to ensure they mentioned sponsors by name. These findings
suggest that Twitter content about ICPC’s sponsors does not perform as well as other types of
content.

Content Period Avg. Engagement with Top 10 Tweets Top Content Type
Contest 234.9 Photos, behind-the-scenes

Out of Contest 52.5 Themed hashtags, coder spotlights

Sponsor 3.9 Behind-the-scenes videos
Table 2: Overview of the engagement with ICPC’s content during contest periods, outside of contest periods, and
with content about sponsors.
 8

Facebook

ICPC’s Facebook page has 531,692 likes and benefits from frequent posting. Using post data
provided from ICPC’s Facebook page from May to September 2019, the average engagement,
defined as the sum of shares, likes, and comments, on ICPC’s 96 posts was 88. The top post had
900 engagements and was about an ICPC alumni meeting. The top ten posts by type and
average engagement can be found below.

Post Type of Top 10 Facebook Posts Number of Posts Average Engagement

Alumni Event 2 729.5
Link to Telegram Messenger 1 657

Quote, photo, and themed hashtag 4 322

ICPC Winner Spotlight 1 198

Afghanistan National Contest Photo 1 196

Question and Photo 1 178
Table 3: Average engagement with ICPC’s top 10 Facebook posts by post type.

All of the top 10 Facebook posts included a photo, three were #MotivationMonday quotes, and
two were invitations to alumni events. Only one post of the 96 contained the word “sponsor.”
Below are two examples of successful ICPC Facebook posts. The #MotivationMonday post
below had the most shares, 50, of any post during these months.
 9

YouTube

ICPCNews has 11.5K subscribers on YouTube and hundreds of videos ranging from meet the
team videos to coding solutions videos. In 2019, ICPC had an average of 495 views on its
channel. The highest number of views, 4,766, occurred on April 4, 2019 – the day of the 2019
World Finals. The 15 days with the most views on ICPC’s YouTube channel in 2019 were all in
April and centered around the date of the World Finals. Strategies for increasing views
throughout the year include: re-promoting videos through posts on your social media platforms
or website and creating evergreen, general videos about the industry that are searchable by
people who are not familiar with ICPCNews’ channel.

Social Listening

Social listening is the monitoring of your brand’s social media for feedback, mentions of ICPC,
discussions relating to your target keywords, or discussions related to competitors. This
monitoring is followed by an analysis of your brand’s current content as compared to the
content users want or competitors are publishing. It is a key way to remain up-to-date and
competitive in the industry by keeping tabs on what others are saying about you and what
others are doing to be successful in the same space. Keeping tabs on this information allows
you to identify key areas for growth and act upon those opportunities promptly.

How to Listen

ICPC Dashboards

You have a few options to begin monitoring mentions of your own brand, and a good starting
place is setting up a dashboard like the one below.

You can create a free dashboard on Google Sheets or Excel by setting up a table in which you
can record the date of the mention, where it came from, what it said, the sentiment, and if any
action needs to be taken. This process, though cost-effective, requires daily manual monitoring
of your brand. Setting up ​Google Alerts​ for ICPC and related keywords will ensure you get an
email when your keywords are mentioned on the internet.
 10

You can also choose to monitor your mentions either directly on social media platforms or via a
paid third-party platform like ​Hootsuite​. Hootsuite starts at $29/month and allows you to set up
streams, like the one pictured below, that notify you when someone mentions your brand.

Keyword Optimization

Monitoring and optimizing keywords is a vital way of staying on the pulse of current and
emerging trends in the computer science space. When determining what keywords to track,
create a list of topics you want to be known for, a list of topics you think your audience wants
to know you for, and keywords that might help audiences trying to find information about ICPC.
Incorporate these into your website strategically and only where it would help users. While the
keywords you monitor will change over time, here are a few keywords/topics to monitor for
ICPC:
● “International Collegiate Programming Contest” and “ICPC”
● Common misspellings of ICPC
● Social media handles
● Hashtags like #ICPC2019
● General industry hashtags like #computerScience
● Names of competitors
 11

Keywords can be monitored with an RSS feed or a free tool like ​Google Keyword Planner.​ Just
as you tracked the date, link, sentiment, and action needed for mentions, track the same areas
for keyword results.

Competitors

It is valuable to perform a competitive analysis every three months to remain up-to-date and
competitive in the industry. To determine some of ICPC’s competitors, I searched one of ICPC’s
potential keywords, “college programming contest,” and took note of what competitions came
up. Three of ICPC’s competitors that would be valuable to monitor include: ​Microsoft’s Imagine
Cup​, ​Google Code Jam​, and the ​International Olympiad in Informatics​.

Best practices for monitoring these competitors include following them on all social media
channels, setting up Google Alerts for mentions of their brands, and keeping track of mentions
of their brand in the same way you track ICPC’s mentions.

Social Media Goals, Objectives, and KPIs

Goals
1. To shine the light on the brightest collegiate programmers.
2. To maintain and increase donations from corporate sponsors.
Objectives and KPI’s
1. To increase engagement with ICPC’s social media content, both during and outside of
the contest period, by 5 percent by the end of 2020.
2. To increase social media engagement with content about current corporate sponsors on
Twitter from 3.9 to the post average of 7.3 engagements by the end of 2020
3. To increase posts about corporate sponsors on Facebook from one post in the last four
months to at least 20 posts from January 2020 to December 2020.
4. To establish social media interaction between ICPC and both current sponsors and
industry influencers by the end of 2020.

Recommendations

Social media
● During the world finals, create more tweets with photos, hashtags, and
behind-the-scenes content.
 12

● During non-contest times, continue to create more of the following content types:
tweets that spotlight coders/teams, tweet photos or videos, and posts that use themed
hashtags like #WisdomWed or #MotivationMonday.
● On Facebook, post more invitations to alumni events, continue to utilize the themed
#MotivationMonday hashtag, and include a photo with posts.
Keywords
● Use Google Keyword Planner to create a list of relevant keywords
● Set up Google Alerts for your list of keywords
● Create a dashboard (see example above) for daily tracking of keyword sentiment and
action to be taken
● Thoughtfully incorporate popular keywords into the copy of your website
Competitors
● Set up Google Alerts for the brand names of competitors
● Create a dashboard similar to the one used for your own brand’s monitoring to track
mentions of your competitors.

SEO Audit

The Value of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important tool to help ICPC create content that will
satisfy the user’s intent during a search. It is a way to both increase the quality and usability of
your website while helping you rank higher in Google searches. As search engines serve billions
of results every day, SEO is a way to make sure ICPC’s website is served to users looking for
your content.

Technical SEO Audit

One of the first steps for ensuring effective SEO is a technical SEO audit. This has little to do
with your use of keywords or the content of your website but rather takes inventory of how
effectively your website is constructed. If search engines have problems crawling and indexing
your pages, it can negatively impact your ranking on the SERP. I used a tool called the
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool​ to take inventory of the technical SEO of ICPC News’ website
http://icpcnews.com/​. Key indicators of successful technical SEO include working inbound and
outbound links, proper use of title and header tags and alt text in HTML, user-friendly page
architecture and speed, and no duplicate content.1

1
​https://www.reliablesoft.net/technical-seo/
 13

Links
Of the 137 URL’s encountered, only two of them, the link to a ​2018 world finals manual​ and a
2019 world finals YouTube video​, were blocked by a robots.txt file, or a file that gives
instructions to search engines about how to crawl and index that page. Ideally, you want pages
with important, relevant information to be crawled. Two links, to a ​press page​ and a ​dashboard​,
resulted in a 404 not found error and should be updated or removed from the website as they
negatively impact user experience and cannot be indexed by Google.2

HTML Tags
Page titles are very important for SEO. They are what is displayed on SERPs and are meant to be
short, accurate descriptions of what can be found on that page. While every page of ICPC News’
website has a title, every title tag has a duplicate – meaning another page titled the same thing.
For 11 different pages, the ICPC only uses the titles, “ICPC Gallery”, “ICPCNews”, and “Login”.
Using unique titles tells search engines that your content is unique and has high value. Having
duplicate content can lead to Google not crawling your page and user confusion.

Meta descriptions are also an important factor in technical SEO. Meta tags provide valuable
information about your page’s content to search engines and make it easier for search engines
to determine what your content is about. While all of ICPC’s pages have a meta description, the
descriptions all share the same description as another page and are duplicates. For the same
reasons listed in the title section, each page should be given its own unique meta description.

The H1 tag in HTML signifies the first header that’s visible on a page. H1 is often used for article
of section titles. Search engines consider content in H1 tags vital to describing what the page is
about and value that information heavily when deciding what results to serve users.3 Two of
ICPC’s pages are missing H1 tags, a ​2019 photo album​ and a ​photo page​, and nine pages have
duplicate H1 tags, meaning they share the same H1 as another page. ICPC’s ​press page​ uses two
H1 tags on the same page which can be confusing for search engines in deciding how to
categorize the page’s content.

H2 tags, or the HTML tag that signifies a secondary heading, are also highly valued by search
engines for the same reasons as H1 tags and should be optimized. Of the 11 pages indexed,
eight were missing H2 tags and two pages share the same H2 tag of “Press, Quote, Facts.”

Images and alt text are one last element of HTML tags that, when optimized with keywords and
short descriptions, can help both search engines and users understand your content. Alt text is

2
​ ttp://bit.ly/33ZD8FH
h
3
​http://bit.ly/2PhNs6V
 14

a descriptor of images that displays when images don’t load, when you hover over an image, or
when visually impared users have the page read to them. Of the 54 images indexed, 24 were
missing alt text. All of the photos with alt text shared the same or similar descriptions like
“image/jpeg;charset=” that would not be helpful for search engines or users in determining the
content of the images. Alt text should be optimized for each photo to provide a unique,
accurate description of the photo.

Page Architecture and Speed

Page architecture refers to how a website’s pages are structured and linked together. The best
websites are built to help both users and search engines easily find what they are looking for on
your website.4 Some principles for optimizing page architecture include:
● Don’t make people think to find what they are looking for.
● Make all of your content accessible in as few clicks as possible, ideally three or less.
● Look at how competitors design their website’s navigation and consider replicating that
style of navigation if that is what users expect as the industry standard.

To test the page architecture of ICPCNews’ website, I navigated the website in search of the
date of the 2018 ICPC World Finals. I evaluated the success of this search on the three
principles bulleted above. The date of the 2018 finals proved hard to find. I changed the history
of the website to 2018, then clicked on the main website block, “Stories”, that had a title about
the 2018 winners. The link took me to a different story, titled “Reaching new heights for ICPC”,
that had nothing to do with the 2018 winners or date of the finals.

4
​https://moz.com/learn/seo/website-architecture-internal-links-video
 15

Overall, ICPCNews’ website suffers from the lack of any sort of navigational menu beyond the
“History” dropdown, pictured above, where users can pick a year to look at. Even then, the
content linked to under the year 2018 had to do with 2019 or 2020 contests. ICPC could benefit
from a navigational menu like the one used on Google Code Jam’s website, pictured below.

Using Google PageSpeed Insights, an online tool that identifies and gives suggestions for
performance best practices on any given website, ICPC News’ site got a 94 out of 100 for mobile
speed and a 99 for desktop speed. Though these are near perfect scores, opportunities to
improve include: serving images in next-gen formats, eliminating render-blocking resources,
efficiently encoding images, and properly sizing images.

Recommendations
A summary of recommendations from the SEO audit include:
● Update or remove both links resulting in a 404 not found error.
● Ensure every page has a title and effectively uses H1 and H2 tags.
● Remove duplicate content by creating unique page titles, H1 & H2 titles, and meta titles.
● Optimize alt text for photos so it gives a unique description of the photo.
● Add a navigational system or menu to ICPCNews’ website to improve page architecture.
● Make all content accessible within three clicks from the homepage.
 16

Conclusion
This digital strategy guide gives practical and actionable recommendations as to how to
effectively establish ICPC’s online presence through SEO and social media. Through a few small
changes to ICPC’s website, implementation of an achievable social media strategy, and active
online monitoring of both ICPC and competitors, ICPC can achieve its goals of shining the light
on the brightest collegiate programmers while also maintaining and increasing donations from
corporate sponsors.
 17

Summary of Recommendations
Search audit
● Consider leveraging partnerships with universities and encourage them to link to your
direct website from their websites
● Implement keywords on different pages of your website so they rank for the search
term, “International Collegiate Programing Contest.” You want your pages to show up
so you control the information.
● Include a link on your website to the ​Forbes article​, search result 39, about ICPC as it is a
high-value link that will help your page rank higher.
● There is a ​research article​, “A retrospective overview of International Collegiate
programming contest data,” that appears three times in the top 50 results and
aggregates information about past contestants that could be valuable for incentivizing
sponsors.
Twitter influencers
● Interact with their tweets by retweeting, favoriting, and commenting from ICPC’s
Twitter.
● Reach out to these influencers, especially the universities, and let them know when you
are running a campaign or trying to promote a regional contest in their area.
● Ask industry questions that can be answered succinctly and mention these influencers in
your tweets.
● Create a tweet, blog post, or dedicate a page of your website to the top 10 influencers
in the industry and mention the influencers highlighted above.
● Offer incentives, like ICPC swag (shirts, hats, etc…) or hints about the next world finals
destination, if they help spread your messaging or tweet about you
Social media
● During the world finals, create more tweets with photos, hashtags, and
behind-the-scenes content.
● During non-contest times, create tweets that spotlight coders/teams, tweet photos or
videos, and use themed hashtags like #WisdomWed or #MotivationMonday.
● On Facebook, post more invitations to alumni events, utilize the themed
#MotivationMonday hashtag, and include a photo with posts.
Keywords
● Use Google Keyword Planner to create a list of relevant keywords
● Set up Google Alerts for your list of keywords
● Create a dashboard (see example above) for daily tracking of keyword sentiment and
action to be taken
● Thoughtfully incorporate popular keywords into the copy of your website
Competitors
● Set up Google Alerts for the brand names of competitors
 18

● Create a dashboard similar to the one used for your own brand’s monitoring to track
mentions of your competitors.
Technical SEO
● Update or remove both links resulting in a 404 not found error.
● Ensure every page has a title and effectively uses H1 and H2 tags.
● Remove duplicate content by creating unique page titles, H1 & H2 titles, and meta titles.
● Optimize alt text for photos so it gives a unique description of the photo.
● Add a navigational system or menu to ICPCNews’ website to improve page architecture.
● Make all content accessible within three clicks from the homepage.