Social media has become an amazing tool for both individuals and groups to grow their brand, share their opinion and connect with others anywhere in the world.
As to whether athletes, specifically college athletes, should have twitter has been argued back in forth. Many coaches, like Purdue basketball coach Matt Painter, have banned twitter in-season.
I don’t like that decision for many reasons, but mostly because college is a place where kids mature into adults and learn valuable tools for the rest of their life. Taking away twitter is holding back an important lesson.
Recently, Purdue head football coach Danny Hope was asked about social media and while he didn’t discount its uses, he doesn’t understand the fascination.
“Personally, I’m not a big tweet guy. I do have a twitter account, but all I really use my twitter account for is on an occasional basis, I’ll tweet some things, some facts about football. To me, tweeting is a lot like keeping a diary. Back in the day, men didn’t keep diaries to share our secrets, so I don’t get the twitter thing. It doesn’t excite me a whole lot.”
Hope does have an account, but he hasn’t posted since Oct. 4th, 2011.
Social media has become a huge recruiting tool, so much so that the NCAA now allows coaches to communicate with prospective athletes via private messaging on Facebook on twitter. Younger generations are used to instant communication and these private messages, in addition to text messages, have essentially taken the place of email.
Hope admitted that it can help current student-athletes connect with future classes.
“Our recent signing class had a chance to bond some throughout the recruiting process. They connected via twitter, facebook and all that, so that’s a good thing.”
Some teenagers don’t understand that they are broadcasting a message for anyone to see and often times they will write a thought that they wouldn’t say in public. It has cost multiple student-athletes their scholarship and affected their reputation.
“Sometimes it can be damaging because things happen, guys express their feelings and get emotional. Someone may catch you at an emotional moment and you might say something you haven’t given a lot of thought to and every once in a while that happens.”
What some coaches may not understand is that fans really enjoy reading their coaches thoughts and that it’s a fantastic tool for free advertising.
Every tweet from Purdue’s official football account may be seen by their almost 17,000 followers. When Indiana basketball coach Tom Crean tweets his thoughts, nearly 70,000 followers will see what he said and that doesn’t include those that may retweet or post his thoughts to a website.
It has unlimited possibilities. But only if one is active and provides quality content.
“I’ll be okay the rest of my life without it. It just isn’t me. I don’t get it….Maybe I’m just too old.”
Watch what Coach Hope had to say below at 11:00 minute mark:
[Quotes from video via BoilermakerFootball on YouTube]
Knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can do.