Recruiting Tools For Social Media For Football Players
Written By: Gridiron Elite Training
Recruiting Tools For Social Media For Football Players
Written By: Gridiron Elite Training
Recruiting had changed a lot in the last few years compared to when we were playing back in the day. The popularity of social media for football players continues to grow.
Let’s say you just had a fantastic game. Maybe you have four touchdowns or an incredible one-handed catch to win the game. You received player of the game and you’re being interviewed by the local media afterward. You’re a neighborhood hero!
Nowadays, nearly all high schools have a Hudl page where your coach will post your school’s highlights and individual highlights per athlete. Maybe a college coach will come across your film and see the highlights of your great game, but that can be weeks or months down the line.
How can you know coaches will see your highlight immediately and for free?
Top Recruiting Tools For Social Media For Football Players
Football Recruiting Social Media
This is where social media comes in! Many college coaches are already using social media outlets, like Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok, to recruit athletes. How can you ensure your kids’ highlights get in front of the right college coaches?
We want to cover football recruiting social media tools and how you can use social media to market yourself as an athlete, grow your social media following to create buzz for yourself, and then go over some guidelines and rules when using social media.
Social Media For Football Players In The Recruitment Process
When social media is being used for the right reasons, it is one of the best recruiting tools you have. You can use everything social media offers to get in contact with coaches, so they can see what kind of student-athlete you are, and you can get noticed by coaches who were not previously recruiting you.
With social media being such a powerful tool, there are some policies and rules we want you to understand. These rules are less strict than the traditional recruiting rules.
Today, we’ll dive into Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok so you can use them as football recruiting social media tools to market yourself to college football coaches.
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms out there today. When it first started, Instagram was primarily used by the younger generation. Nowadays, Instagram has become one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, with roughly around 1 billion monthly active users.
What’s great about Instagram is the use of photos and videos within the platform. You can showcase your highlights on your wall, reel, or stories. Also, if you visit a school or receive a scholarship offer, you can post your pictures in a carousel thanking the coaches for the experience and scholarship offer, respectively.
Athletes use Instagram, and colleges use IG to promote their teams and schools as a recruiting tool to gain interest from potential recruits. We like Instagram the most because of the many different features it offers for athletes.
The best tool we believe all recruits should take advantage of is the IGTV feature. With the IGTV tool, you can post your highlights for up to 10 minutes on your page. You can direct recruits to watch your highlights directly on your account! I suggest taking clips from your HUDL page and uploading your highlights to your IGTV.
Tell your friends and teammates to watch the video, like it, share it, and comment positively on it. The more engagement you can get on your highlight video, the more reach and exposure you will receive. If schools are on your radar or interested, tag them in your highlight video before posting it or in the comments. We recommend writing out at least 10-15 schools to tag within the video and saving the rest for tagging in your comments.
Important tips when using Instagram to promote yourself as a student-athlete:
Use hashtags: Use hashtags that are relevant to your highlight film. For example, if you’re posting your football highlights, don’t use the hashtag #baseballhighlights. If you’re a quarterback, don’t use #runningback. You want your hashtags to be specific to you.
Network: Promoting yourself is crucial for increasing your exposure and maximizing your chances of getting recruited and receiving a scholarship offer. We recommend to all of our athletes to follow other football players from their position, the schools they’re interested in, and coaches from the schools they’re interested in.
Reach out and introduce yourself in a DM to the schools, coaches, and other athletes. Start engaging with their posts consistently. The more you are active on IG, you will receive exposure. Also, the other athletes you’re engaging with will start to return the favor by engaging with your posts, giving you an extra boost for your exposure.
Post relative content: We suggest only posting content related to getting recruited. If you need to create two accounts, one for personal posts and another for football, then do that. You don’t want to start posting random posts out with your friends one night and then your highlights the next day. You want to work with the Instagram algorithm by telling it that your content is specific to football, and IG will start to feature your content to others with the same passion and interests.
Twitter is another social media platform that is great for recruiting student-athletes. We love Twitter’s quick interactions between coaches and student-athletes. Although videos and images are not as prevalent on Twitter as on IG, you can still post your highlights, videos, and pictures as tweets.
One of the best ways to get your highlight film in front of coaches is to tag the accounts you want to play for. Post your highlights on your timeline, and tag the coaches in your post.
Since Twitter limits the number of characters allowed per tweet, you can reevaluate and post your highlights later in the week or the following week and tag a new set of coaches.
Ask your friends to like or retweet your Tweets. That way, the coaches and teams tagged in your Tweet will receive a notification every time somebody engages with it.
You can also follow other recruits that already received scholarships and start retweeting and liking their tweets. That way, they will most likely return the favor and retweet and like your content when you post. Networking is huge!
Use hashtags as much as you can. Do your research to see what hashtags the college uses so that you can use those same hashtags to get your tweets noticed and in front of the college teams that you want to play for.
Important tips when using Twitter to promote yourself as a student-athlete:
Use hashtags: Use hashtags that are relevant to your tweets. For example, if you’re posting your football highlights, don’t use the hashtag #basketballhighlights. If you’re a linebacker, don’t use #offensivelineman. You want your hashtags to be specific to you.
Network: Promoting yourself is essential for increasing your exposure and maximizing your chances of getting recruited and receiving a scholarship offer. We recommend to all of our athletes to follow other football players from their position, the schools they’re interested in, and coaches from the schools they’re interested in. Reach out and introduce yourself in a message to the schools, coaches, and other athletes. Start engaging with their posts consistently. The more you are active on Twitter, you will receive exposure. Also, the other athletes you’re engaging with will start to return the favor by engaging with your tweets, retweeting, and favoriting your tweets, giving you an extra boost to help with your recruiting.
Post relative content: We recommend only posting content related to getting recruited. If you need to create two accounts, one for personal posts and another for football, then do that. You don’t want to start tweeting random tweets about gaming or with your friends and your football plays the next day. You want to work with the Twitter algorithm by telling it that your content is specific to football, and Twitter will start to feature your content to others with the same passion and interests.
TikTok
What we like about TikTok is the increasing popularity of the platform and the fact that anyone can go viral on TikTok. Although coaches are not on TikTok as much as Twitter and Instagram, we still want to cover how you can use the platform to increase your chances of getting more exposure and a scholarship.
Coaches can go on TikTok and search based on suggested videos and hashtags. Some coaches will use TikTok to find athletes showcasing their athletic ability and football clips.
The only problem with TikTok compared to Instagram is the length of the videos. TikTok videos are limited to one minute when you string four 15-second segments together, compared to Instagram videos, where you can post up to 10 minutes on IGTV, depending on your account.
Important tips when using Tik Tok to promote yourself as a student-athlete:
Use hashtags: Use hashtags that are relevant to your posts. For example, if you’re posting your football plays, don’t use the hashtag #trackhighlights. If you’re a wide receiver, don’t use #sackcity. You want your hashtags to be specific to you.
Network: Promoting yourself is essential for increasing your exposure and maximizing your chances of getting recruited and receiving a scholarship offer. We recommend to all of our athletes to follow other football players from their position, the schools they’re interested in, and coaches from the schools they’re interested in. Reach out and introduce yourself in a DM to the schools, coaches, and other athletes. Start engaging with their posts consistently. The more you are active on Tik Tok, you will receive exposure. Also, the other athletes you’re engaging with will start to return the favor by engaging with your posts, giving you an extra boost for your exposure.
Post relative content: We suggest only posting content related to getting recruited. If you need to create two accounts, one for personal posts and another for football, then do that. You don’t want to start posting random posts out with your friends one night and then your highlights the next day. You want to work with the Tik Tok algorithm by telling it that your content is specific to football, and Tik Tok will start to feature your content to others with the same passion and interests.
Key Takeaways - Recruiting Tools For Social Media For Football Players
The recruiting process has changed so much in the past decade. Being present on social media platforms could be the difference between who sees your film and who does not.
We know it may seem like a lot of work upfront for you, but taking these steps may lead to a few potential scholarship offers, maybe even scholarships you were not expecting. Don’t wait for your high school football coach to get your name out there, but be proactive and do everything you can to get yourself noticed by coaches.
Suppose you need more tips on maximizing your chances of getting a college football scholarship. In that case, you can read our latest posts on “How To Get Scouted For Football Using Social Media” and “Best Football Camps For Exposure To Get Recruited.”
Suppose you’re a serious football player looking to play at the next level. You can access our sports performance training programs, football drills, workouts, and the Gridiron Recruiting Center inside “The Gridiron Academy” to help you with your football recruiting.
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We created “The Gridiron Elite Academy” which is an online football performance network that provides football players of all levels with sports performance workout programs, football position-specific drills, mindset coaching, mental toughness training, recruiting guidance and help, and nutrition programs.
