Mason Waters

The Opportunity Social Media Allows Your Program Are Limitless

Since 2011, the greatest sports provider on earth, ESPN, has averaged a loss of two million subscribers per year. Yes, 2,000,000 people a year are saying “no” to ESPN, the traditional sports provider, and going elsewhere for their sports consumption. In a similar context, multiple studies confirm that nearly 90% of teenagers (high school student-athletes/recruits) are active on social media. More data suggests youngsters are spending dozens of hours per month online.

Where are sport consumers going these days? Where are your recruits giving most of their attention to? Where are your fans spending hours upon hours a week to entertain themselves? The answer is simple, social media. Who isn’t on it these days? YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and more platforms get millions upon millions of views and hits, daily, on sports content. And for your college basketball program, this is extraordinary news.

Today 76% percent of 13-17 year olds use instagram. 75% use snapchat, and 47% of teens use twitter.1 I follow countless high school basketball players across multiple platforms (Twitter, Instagram, etc.) for the purpose of observing their online behavior and to find out how to interact best with them. Many of these kids are high quality prospects. It’s true that a vast majority of the kids your team targets are on social media. You probably already knew that, and if you did, that is great. But knowing that is not nearly enough to use your personal or programs social media pages effectively.

Quite frankly, way too many individuals, coaches, and athletic departments have a terribly inaccurate and unfair view of social media. I’ve talked with multiple college basketball coaches and can verify this is true. As Alex Cervasio, digital consultant to George Raveling, Buzz Williams, and Brendan Suhr says, “Coaching is not a 9-5 job, it’s a 24/7 365 commitment to impacting others and changing lives forever and social media enables that.”2 To those coaches and athletic departments who see social media as a negative, a space where only negative things are posted, they are losing and falling behind. There are countless benefits to social media and you’ll discover many in this book.