In this webinar, Front Office Sports CEO Adam White hosts opendorse CEO Blake Lawrence, Athlete Marketing Expert Zach Soskin, Twitter Sports Partner Manager David Herman, and Facebook Head of Sports Partnerships Vincent Pannozzo to discuss the state of social media in college athletics and the opportunities the current landscape presents for student-athletes.
Notable Quotes:
Lawrence: “My brother is a tight end out of Kansas City, a three-star prospect. He ended up with nineteen Division I scholarship offers and had by the end of it over 190 different coaches from DI programs follow him. Every single one of those offers started with a direct message on Twitter.”
Pannozzo: “Once you get to the pros, you might be on a team for 10 years, maybe on a team for one year. So if you bounce around from team-to-team, those followers may come and go. But your college fan base is going to be sticking with you probably long after your playing days are done.”
Herman: “The key is reaching student-athletes where they are, and where they are is on our platforms.
Key Takeaways:
- Student-athletes are now way more involved in recruiting each other, which is done primarily through social media
- Communication with recruits has become a mix of 1-to-1 communication and 1-to-many, with schools actively trying to create content that can be used for both
- A school’s content creators and social team have become an extension of the team and have the power to help the team win through recruiting
- Athletes want content, and they want to play for schools that are going to help them build their brand and grow their following while they are enrolled
- Team photographers regularly take more than 500 photos at practice and only use 20 of them, leaving over 90% of captured content unused
- If you have content, share it. Not all content needs to be premium
- Having content that is right for that channel or right for that audience is way more important than having something that is overly produced
- When sharing content from practice, student-athletes were on average getting 15x more video views than they had followers
- 30% of a professional athlete’s audience comes from their college, professional teams need to do a better job of capturing that audience-
