How to use social media for recruiting (the right way)

Hey team Alex here. Thanks for joining me. And in today's video we're going to be talking about which social media is best for your recruiting, to maximize your recruiting process and make sure we're at the place where all the college coaches are at. That's very important. We need to go to where the college coaches are at to help us with our recruiting process. And this one specific social media is where most of them are at comparatively to all the others. We're also going to be talking about how to set up our profile correctly to again help us with our recruiting and how to correctly post as we go through this again, just to help us with our recruiting. My name is Alex Swinson. If you're new to this channel, I'm a former Division 1 college baseball coach, scout and recruiter. And now I'm here to help you go through this recruiting process and to help you reach the next level and find the best college fit for you, for your son. If you get anything from this video, please smash that like button that thumbs up. Feel free to share it as well and subscribe to my channel down below. I put out a weekly video on how to go through and navigate this recruiting process and how to just get better on and off the field. All right, let's hop into it. Alright team, before we get into the social media platform, I want to talk about a different platform that I consider more of a video platform and it might very well be a social media platform by some people's standards. And that's totally fine besides the point, but that is YouTube. Okay? YouTube is going to be very important that we utilize this in our recruiting process. And we have our personal recruiting video there with our showcase, highlights our game footage and showing your best skill set. That's going to be very important that these coaches want at your specific position. So a lot of student athletes and or parents make the mistake of sending video to college coaches and they have to download the video or they have to go through certain steps to see the video. They have to like put in a password or they have to go to one, two or three other sites or clicks. College coaches one, if it's, if you send them a download and it's specifically to their university email, well usually the university email software server, I should say it's going to notify them, do not download this because they're worried about viruses, etc. From there. So they're not going to download it. Or some of them, a lot of them won't download it, some might will, but then if you go the other route, where you have to click a bunch of different links and put it in a password, college coaches are just. They're not going to do that. They're not going to take extra time out of watching this video where it could just be super easy, where it's a YouTube link. Boom, and it pops right up. Your personal recruiting video pops right up, and it's right there. So make sure that you have a YouTube link in your personal recruiting video that you have is on a YouTube. It's free. You literally drag and drop it there. So it's very, very simple. And again, we can use this on our Twitter profile, which we're going to be talking about right here. Twitter is the place to be right now until something else comes up, okay? Because there's always something else coming up. But Twitter right now is the place to be. Why? Because college coaches are on Twitter, I would say, more than any other social media out there. And it's specifically Twitter has become, for baseball purposes, definitely a recruiting tool to help. And we're going to talk a little bit about that here. So I want to talk about what should your Twitter profile look like? Okay. And we're going to hop right into this right here. So I just pull up a Twitter profile and actually just created this and wanted to show you some of the important things that you want to have on your profile and some of the things that you want to have enabled. Let's start with the top left. So your picture, make sure it's a picture of your face. I could have zoomed in actually a little bit more here to show my face, but use your showcase photo or a good photo of you with a, you know, baseball cap on, maybe your jersey, but your face. Okay? So coaches can recognize you at events. And down to the left, make sure you use your real name, your full name, and then your tagline created. Just make sure that, hey, it's something that coaches. It's not too complicated or it's not a crazy long tag, if you will. Just something simple with your name, maybe a number, et cetera, from there. Now, you also want to have your email and possible phone, if you're comfortable with having your phone number on your Twitter account. So college coaches can contact you easily that way as well. So you'll see the email here. And if you wanted to put your phone, it'll be right by it or right under it, I should say, put your location. Where are you located at? So coaches know where you're at. And then down here below when you put your recruiting video on your Twitter profile or you post it, make sure you pin it. So if you're new to Twitter and you're not sure when you tweet something, okay, the tweet is actually this button right here. You can create a tweet and upload your video to this. Pin it. You can go there and there's going to be three dropdowns here where it will ask you, do you want to pin it? And you say, yes, pin it. What does pin it mean? Pin it means it puts it at the top of your profile. So you want your recruiting video or any video that you post at the top of your profile. While we're on video, you can update video. You don't have to always have your personal recruiting video up on the top. If you update video and it's you swinging or you a quick bullpen. And by the way, these videos should not be long at all, by the way. They don't need to be long. You could put that up there. It's a good way to pin and update coaches on top of your profile and tag, which we're going to talk about here shortly. Moving up to the top right is make sure to allow direct messages from everyone. So allow people to contact you. If you do not have this, it can be harder for coaches to personally think of this as a Twitter email. They can email you throughout the Twitter software, but if you don't have that enabled, they cannot personally contact you. And a lot of coaches utilize this. As far as the direct message or as the kids say, DMs here. So make sure that's enabled. That's in your settings as you go. Now for the bio. Very, very important here. Bio should include key info that these college coaches want. So the year of your graduation, you could be 2023. Now you could be in 2020, 2025. Year of graduation. Position. What position or positions do you play? In this example, just put middle infielder and metrics. Only show the metrics that are your top metrics. If something doesn't suit you, then don't show it right now. Okay? Maybe you're working on it and then when you're ready to post it, you can post it or put it to your profile. This is. Think of this as your digital resume. You're just showing your best stuff here, okay? Your high school and then also your travel team. So coaches again, know where you're at and the travel team that you play for. Travel team is important because if you are on a travel team, a Summer travel team. Some coaches could follow you specifically if they're looking for you. Now, it doesn't always make sense to play for a travel team. I've done a video about that in the past. But if you are on a travel team, you can put that here. Now let's talk about opposite. What does a good post look like? Let's dive into this. I created one here. So one, you want to have your verified numbers. Whether that's in your profile that we just talked about or it's in a post, this is a good post to have that shows everything outlined. Okay? So your grad year, your position and I kind of switch it over to a picture here just to show a different position and right handed picture. Maybe you're a big physical guy. So you want to put that. Me, I'm not a big, I wasn't a big physical guy in high school. All right? I'm five, seven. So I wouldn't necessarily put five, seven because that could actually turn off coaches, okay? I want them to come see me. I want them to get on their radar. So I put 6, 5, 2, 25. I'm meaning this is, in this example you should put that if you're a big physical guy because that can help you. Okay? That's the reality of it. Then we got the basketball averages. So this is verified numbers. Whether it's at a showcase or you have video of you throwing a pin and you have a radar gun, boom. You throw the fastball and it either pops up on there on a, on a gun and it says 96.4. That is verified. If you don't have verified numbers, if you just say I throw 88 miles an hour. That's not verified. You need to have it verified by either the gun or a, or a PBR perfect game or a different showcase or an event that you go at spin rate. If you have the spin rate for pitchers, slider change up. Just the stuff that's important from a pitcher's perspective here. Now if you are a position player, you can have similar things that you had in your profile. Maybe it's your arm velocity from shortstop or outfield, your exit velocity, your 60 time. If you're a center fielder, outfielder, middle infielder, that's going to be important to show. Maybe you hit a bunch of home runs during the summer. You could put, hey, seven home runs, five home runs, four home runs this summer or in high school, going forward. That stuff is important. Pitchers. What you could also put that I didn't have here is strikeout to walk ratio. So strike out to walk ratio is going to be very important to college coaches. Make sure that you're throwing strikes and you're not giving up. Free basis. Now let's talk about tags. So you don't want to tag every coach in the world. Okay. Because an issue could be is if you don't have any communication with them and you continue to tag them, you're kind of annoying them, honestly. Okay. Now if you have some traction with them and you've done some of the things that we've talked about in past videos to get their attention and you've been talking to them, or maybe they liked your video or liked your tweet, you can tag them. It kind of gives permission to tag them. Now, it's not totally against the rules. Maybe you tag them once every few months and see if, hey, you get some playback from them going forward. But if you're continually tagging them, they're just going to tune you out. You don't want that. Now you could go and utilize flat ground for pictures. Flatground does a great job of retweeting guys. And a lot of college coaches are following flatground. So it would be flatground act, I think is their tag, if you will. And they retweet each tweet that comes their way. So college coaches can see that. So that's a good avenue to have. So make sure your profile looks good and you have your real name. You have all the information in your profile. You have your email, you have your phone if you want it, and that you are pinning your video at the top of the page or any updated video that you include going forward. And then make sure you're posting an updating post every once in a while. So if you have new numbers, new verified, or you hit a home run or you strike out or you make a big play, you can put this information and tag certain coaches that might have interactions with or tag flat grounds or other tags that are important. Some other ones that I'm just thinking off the top of my head is PBR uncommitted. So all the uncommitted, you could send them there and they'll retweet it. Perfect game. Uncommitted, you could. You could tag them and they'll retweet it. So just utilize those that can help you with your recruiting using Twitter. Hope this helps and hope to see you in the next video. All right, take care.