Due to the proper infrastructure and last season’s football success, Mississippi State University was able to grow its brand and reach more people than ever before.
“In August we really realized that we were not using social media as effectively as we should have, and by that, I mean we were just not telling the story,” Checky Herrington, an MSU marketing research analyst, said. 
MSU began to make a conscious effort to be more socially aware, and they even hired people to specifically create content for social media. 
 “My goal when I came here was to give social media some life,” Erin Nesbit, a social media specialist for Mississippi State, said.
Mississippi State began to change its approach to social media all together. 
“On social media we are trying to get high-end art,” Sid Salter, the chief communications officer for the public affairs office, said.  “We spent months developing these nuggets of information, but we put these things up where we try to tell a superlative about Mississippi State that they are not aware of, and wrap it around the hashtag STATEPROUD. The reach of this has gotten up to a little over a quarter of a million.”
The reach of a social media post is characterized by how many people will see the post. This is largely influenced by the number of followers on a given social network, and the amount of engagement—sharing, liking or retweeting—any post receives.  
On Facebook, the Mississippi State account saw sizeable increases in the reach of its posts throughout the fall. MSU had a Facebook reach of a little over one million in August, but it rose to just above six million in October. By November the number hit slightly above eight million, and December saw the reach of the posts fall to just below four million. 
While the content on Mississippi State’s Facebook page was growing stronger, it could not give reason for the large increase in people being reached before the sharp decrease. 
By the middle of October, the MSU football team had risen to No. 1 in the country and stayed there for five weeks. Halfway through November Mississippi State fell out of the No. 1 spot after   losing to Alabama in a top five matchup and then another loss to Ole Miss near the end of the month. 
Over that period of time, MSU saw its Facebook reach grow substantially as well as its applications for admissions.
“We began the cycle up in applications, but did see a significant increase in October and November,” said John R. Dickerson, who is the interim executive director of enrollment at Mississippi State University. 
The sharp increase in  admissions for Mississippi State are similar to what has happened to other schools. On Nov. 23, 1984, Doug Flutie, the Boston College quarterback, flung a Hail Mary into the end zone to win a football game over the University of Miami. This was an iconic play in football history that would be replayed on national television numerous times for the following months. 
“People began to notice that the next fall, BC had a marked increase in enrollment, and hence began the ‘Flutie Effect.’ You had about 50 percent of the academic community reject the whole notion,” Salter said. “It was happen stance. It was other factors. It was general recruiting by BC admission folks, but it wasn’t Flutie.”
For the next few decades people in the academic community began to study whether there was actually a tangible way to see the  ‘Flutie Effect.’
“There is a significant amount of literature out there about whether or not the ‘Flutie Effect’ is real,” Salter said. “The definitive research, some of which has come out of California-Berkley, is that the ‘Flutie Effect’ indeed is measureable and real.”
With more attention being brought onto MSU than ever before, the university began to use the extra exposure to spread news about what the campus has to offer.  
“We have a lot of secrets here and that’s pretty sad because there is a lot of great stuff going on here,” Nesbit said. 
MSU has tried not to turn the attention away from the success of the football program, but instead use the success as a jumping off point for the rest of the university. 
“We have not used our increase in eyes to say, ‘boy aren’t we great at football.’ It is such a huge opportunity to focus on the academic success of the university, and we have tried really hard not to squander that,” Salter said.