[trx_quote cite=”#” title=”Mandy Green”]Come up with a system to do your social media this year so you can use it to your advantage with recruiting over your competitors who aren’t going to be as organized.[/trx_quote]
Win the Day Method for Social Media
For those who know me or have worked with me in some capacity before, you know that whenever possible, I am a fan of doing a task once, documenting how I did it, analyzing it, and then finding areas where improvements can be made or waste eliminated so when I have to do it again, the quality is better and I can work through it faster. I hate doing repeatable tasks off the top my head because how it gets done is usually random. I find that random procedures equals random results. Random results are bad for coaches and I think it is a huge waste of time and energy.
It is more up-front work, but it saves me a ton of time on the back end.
I want to show you how this could apply to your social media this year. I talk to at least 10 coaches every week about how to be productive with recruiting and in the office. I would say 9 out of 10 tell me that they don’t feel like they use social media very well. They struggle to come up with posts every week, aren’t consistent, or just delegate it to one of their students to find things to post about.
Since most coaches now can’t contact a recruit until their Junior year, I believe social media will become 10x more important for coaches to tell their story and reach the younger ones who they are interested in. I don’t want you to leave your success to chance and telling your story through social media up to your athletes.
What I want to help you with today is coming up with a system to do your social media this year so you can use it to your advantage with recruiting over your competitors who aren’t going to be as organized. I want you to do the work once, document it, analyze it, and then make improvements every month going forward so you don’t have to recreate the wheel every year.
Let’s quickly look at the research done by Dan Tudor at Tudor Collegiate Strategies
If you are a Dan Tudor fan, you know from his research of surveying 1,000’s of recruited student athletes every year that they make decisions based on how they feel.
In the research, it was found that Facebook is more effective to share information with parents and Alumni. Recruits are most open to see your story or thoughts on Twitter and Instagram. Recruits want to see the personality and what daily life is like for the coach, the team, and of the program.
Recruits want to know-
What does it feel like to be a student athlete at your school? Do I like the team? Will I get along with the team? Does it seem like they have fun?
Ok, so now that you’ve got a quick refresher as to what types of things you should be posting, here is what I want you to do.
- Read this article about creating 52 weeks of content. Then create your posts all at once.
- Create a Dropbox folder for each month of the year where you will store your posts once they have been created. Make sure you indicate which ones were used for Facebook and which ones were for Twitter and Instagram.
- At the end of the month, go back and do a quick run through to see which posts got the most likes, retweets, or comments. Record your numbers.
- To make improvements month by month, based on what got the best results, do more of those types of posts for the following month. For example, you might better results putting in a video or picture than you might get if you just put in text.
If you continue to do this throughout the entire year, at the end of the year, you now have a year’s worth of social media posts already done.
Next year at this time, all you need to do is go into your July folder and recreate all of the posts that you did from last year. Update what needs to be updated. Add what needs to be added. Eliminate what didn’t work. Maybe switch up a picture or tweak the text so it sounds a little better. Even doing all of this will take you significantly less time than it would take to recreate everything from scratch every year.
Now you don’t have to try to think about what to create anymore.
Now you can be consistent.
Now it won’t matter that the coach that managed your program’s social media left to take another job, everything is documented so anybody can do it and keep the standard high.
Now you are in control of telling your story better and better day by day, month by month, and year by year.
This isn’t easy to do, but the time and energy you put into it is worth it.
More coming on social media management over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.
