Social Media As a Recruiting Tool
The right way to use your social media accounts to get recruited
When it comes to social media and recruiting, most of the focus is on what NOT to do. And misusing your social media accounts can indeed hurt your chances of being recruited to play college tennis. But used appropriately, social media can also be a valuable tool that helps you get coaches’ attention.
This is not something that kids younger than high school need to be doing and really the time that social media can be most valuable for a prospect is after the June 15th recruiting date following sophomore year (the unofficial start of the recruiting process for many).
Below are some tips on the right way to use your social media accounts to get recruited.
Create Tennis-Specific Accounts
To effectively use social media to market yourself as a recruit, it is important to create tennis-specific accounts so that coaches can easily follow your progress without having to wade through posts about unrelated things. Use your tennis-specific accounts for posts relevant to your recruiting and personal accounts for everything else. But be aware: coaches will also monitor your personal accounts, so you still need to be careful about posting anything damaging.
If you have a personal account make sure to link to your tennis account in your bio that way someone who finds your personal account first will also know about your tennis account . You can share content from your tennis account to your personal account (e.g. share a post from your tennis account as a story of your personal account) as another way of making sure coaches are aware of both accounts.
Make Sure Your Accounts’ Usernames/Bios Highlight Your Key Recruiting Information
When looking at your social media presence, coaches should be able to see at a glance the most important things about you as a recruit - your high school graduation year, your UTR, where you’re from. These are things that you should work into your username and short bio so that coaches don’t have to go hunting for this information when following you.
Use account profiles and pinned posts to tell the slightly longer (but still elevator pitch-length) version of your story. What sets you apart as a tennis player? What are your goals? What will you bring to a team?
Follow Programs You’re Interested In
Following social media accounts for programs you’re interested in serves two purposes. First, it increases the likelihood that they will follow you back. Second, it is a good way for you to keep tabs on what those programs are up to, which is an important part of your decision-making process and a good way to show coaches you’ve done your homework when talking to them. If a program posts about a big win on Sunday and you have a call with the coach on Monday, congratulating him or her on that win is a good way to start the call.
Depending on the program, social media posts can be a great way to get a feel for what it’s like to be a member of the team. Some programs use social media to do “A Day In the Life Of” features where players take you along as they go to class, attend team meetings and meals, practice, do strength and conditioning, etc.
Create Regular Posts with Relevant Content
Once a program begins following you, you want to keep their interest and use your posts to communicate information that will be helpful to them in the recruiting process. Some examples of good content include:
Updates on your results/rankings - if you’ve won a big match or moved up in the rankings, share that with your followers. Even tough losses can be an opportunity to share what you learned from the experience and what you plan to work on as a result.
Updates on upcoming tournaments - making coaches aware of your tournament schedule increases the likelihood that they’ll take the opportunity to watch you in person.
Video from matches, practices, and workouts - video is a great way to show coaches what you can do. In order for that video to be useful, make sure you shoot it in the right way.
There is no magic formula for how frequently you should be posting. For the most part, this should be driven by how often you have relevant content to share. That said, if possible I would aim for at least one post every 7-10 days. As of right now the trend in tennis seems to be that Instagram is the most popular social media outlet and therefore where you might want to concentrate your social media efforts. On a program by program basis you should try to figure out what, if anything, they’re primarily using.
Use Social Media to Complement Other Communication, Not to Replace It
No matter how slick your social media presence is, there are some coaches who simply won’t pay attention to it. Your posts on social media cannot replace your other communication efforts. They are simply another way to share some of the same information.
One way to think about how to communicate using both social media and other formats has to do with frequency. Social media is a non-intrusive way to share updates on a more regular basis than you normally would with something like email. One approach could be to share frequent updates via social media but then to summarize the most important of those updates in a monthly email to coaches.
If you’d like to discuss how I can help you craft a communications plan for college recruiting, schedule a free consultation here.