by Dan Christensen, Tudor Collegiate Strategies
Is your social media content helping you in your recruiting efforts?
Social media can be a fantastic tool to help coaches connect with recruits. Unfortunately, many programs do not use their social media pages in a way that is helpful for recruiting.
Make sure you are not making these two mistakes, if you want your social media presence to impact recruiting:
1) It is all about your sport
What dominates most social media pages for college athletic programs?
Score updates. Upcoming competitions. Player of the Week recognitions.
All stuff that your fans probably love. And the parents of your current athletes want to see those things. But do your recruits? Not so much.
For recruits, they want to go on social media to get a behind-the-scenes look as to what it is like to be part of your program and a student at your school. What do your athletes do for fun? What are cool things to do in your town? What are the coaches like? Are the coaches relatable and fun or all business, all the time? Those are all questions that your prospects have. Score updates don’t help answer those questions. When trying to post on social media in order to connect with your recruits, ask yourself these questions. Does this showcase our program’s personality? Does this post give recruits a reason why they should choose us?
If you can answer “yes” to either question, that is probably going to be a post that is productive for your recruiting efforts!
2) Inconsistency
Inconsistency in your social media game creates problems.
Lack of consistent posting means your recruits probably are not seeing your content very much. Either, because you simply are not posting very much or because your inconsistency has caused your content not to pop up at the top of their social media feeds.
Just like how your recruiting message needs to be consistent for prospects to pay attention, your social media presence needs consistency.
One common reason for this problem is that for many coaches, their social media strategy revolves around waiting for the right moments to happen in order to capture them and post them. To be a consistent presence on social media, you need to have a plan. Reactive social media posting is not a plan. At least not a good one. Plan ahead what you want to be posting. Use weekly or monthly themes to guide what you post. Incorporate your current athletes to help plan and create content that will really be helpful to prospects.
Be consistent. Showcase more than just your team news. If you can do those things, you will be better using your social media platforms to make an impact on the recruiting front!
Want more research-based strategies custom designed for you and your program? We do that for more than 450 college programs around the country, working one-on-one with them to deliver great messaging – and social media content – that engages with their recruits to help sell your program. To find out how other programs are doing it, click here.