by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
My presentation at the 2020 National Collegiate Recruiting Conference had to do with how coaches can use social media better. I have had a ton of coaches reach out to tell me that they never realized the mistakes they were making in how they were thinking about or working through social media.
Today, I thought I would just walk you through the four biggest mistakes I see coaches making with their social media. If you are interested in digging deeper into this, I will be doing a webinar on Tuesday August 18th at 12pm EST
Walking around with your phone hoping something brilliant happens that you can then share with the world is not a good strategy.
I want your feed to be strategy-based and not spontaneous.
I think when you are relying on posting in real time, you are not in control of the story and message that is going out to the recruits who you are hoping to build trust, build rapport, and create connection with.
When you post in real time it pulls you from the moment you’re in. You’re not able to think about a clever or engaging caption, you’re not able to think about what you want your followers to get from the post or even the WHY behind the post.
Mistake #4: Everything Being Posted Looks and Feels the Same as Your Competitors
When I ask coaches to describe to me the top 4-5 things that they sell recruits on when they come to campus, sure they talk about their sport. What they get passionate about is when they tell me about their values, family, the personalities and character of the team and staff, the academic support, the community, the things to do on campus, etc.
But, when I go to their social media pages, all I see is the sport they coach.
Why are you just posting about your sport? Sure, that is a big part of the decision-making process for an athlete. But recruits want to know if they will fit in with the team. What do they do for fun? What are they like? Do they live together? Post stuff like that.
When you just post about your sport, everything looks the same as everybody else to the recruits you are after.
It would be like hoping you will get a recruit interested in your program after having seen your website.
Coach, you have very little control over the content for your website. I look at the website of a coach before I do a phone consultation with them. I look at dozens of websites every month And they all look the same. They all have the individual names, where they’re from, their height, their position, maybe their major.
How is a recruit able to decide if they will fit in with your team just from the information on the website?
They can’t.
How is a recruit supposed to figure out if they will fit in with your team based off of just seeing game-day pictures or the newsfeed?
They can’t.
The problem with what is getting posted on social media is that everything looks the same. And when everything looks the same to a recruit, they usually decide to go to the school that is giving them more money, or the school that is the cheapest, or this school is a little bit closer to home so mom and dad can come.
We don’t want recruits to make a decision just based on default. You really need to be able to differentiate yourself from everybody else. And so I want you to take a different approach.