Best Platforms to Get Recruited for College Football (And Which Ones to Avoid)

It's time to talk about platforms to get recruited to play college football. So in this video, I'm going to give you a breakdown of each possible platform that you might be considering, give you the pros and cons, and tell you my opinion on what makes sense to do and which platform is the best one. Now, if you don't know what we do here, we're all about getting college football scholarships. My name is Trenton Laura. I played college football and I've also helped over 100 families one on one get college football scholarships. So if you're new here and your goal is to get a college football scholarship, then I recommend you subscribe to the video. And if you're returning one, welcome back. This is going to be a good one. And also if you're trying to get a college football scholarship and you want direct help with it, then you can join us over at your first scholarship. The link to learn more about that is down below. So first things first, let's talk about one that is probably not the best platform, Facebook. So Facebook is probably not the best platform to get recruited to play college football. There's a couple of different reasons for that. First off, it's just difficult to do outreach on there to post that. Just the algorithm and how it's built is not built best for athletes and trying to get recruited. I will say there is a pro to it, just that there's a very low level competition. So you could potentially use it for some recruiting purposes like messaging, coaches, but it's not a place where I would want to build some kind of profile and brand about how I'm a player to get recruited to play college football there. This takes me to my next one, which is Instagram. So Instagram's kind of becoming this controversial thing where people are saying that it's good for recruiting. And so I'll give you a little bit of why it might be good for recruiting as well as why I don't think it is good for recruiting. Why it's becoming more popular is because it's much more of an influencer algorithm, if that makes sense. Their algorithm is becoming much more similar to TikTok, where each video has a chance on its own to get noticed by people. So like, lower level people have much more of a higher chance of getting views, of getting likes, of getting followers, all that kind of stuff. So the reason why some people like it is because you can get recruited. For example, if you have a bad, you can get recruited through big pages. And what I mean by this is That a big page could potentially post about you and get you recruited. And just because Instagram is one of the biggest social medias out there, you just have a lot of people, a lot of eyes, a lot of traffic. It can be helpful in some sense. The issue to me is just it's not very good at being niched down to recruits. Like for example, if you had a coach pull up his Instagram feed, you're probably not seeing in his feed a lot of recruits being mentioned. It can happen every once in a while and you probably do hear some stories of it. But it's not like some of the other platforms where like they can go on their just algorithm feed page and like just see recruits pass through there a lot. It's just not really how it's built. And I just haven't seen there be real reasons to post a ton of content on Instagram or dm many people on Instagram to get recruited by college coaches. This may change in the future, but just right now it just, I don't think it's worth putting in a ton of time and effort into it. If you want, you can put some content on there, see if it happens. But again, I just, I haven't heard any stories outside of again, I just haven't seen many cases where it actually works. The Next one is YouTube. Now I don't think YouTube is good for getting recruited organically. And what I mean by that is that the algorithm isn't going to push a college coach your video. But I do think it's good for showcasing your videos. And this is contrast to Huddle and H u D L which is one of the top platforms for recording video and posting your highlights and all that stuff. The reason for that is that on YouTube you can get better analytics and you can remove the ads that are on Huddle. And so this saves coaches a lot of time as well as they can potentially subscribe to your channel and just get up to date video throughout. That versus Huddle just doesn't really have any features like that. So I do like it as a platform for hosting video. I don't necessarily like it for any other sense. Now let's talk about email. Email is not dead. So one of my favorite things to point out for email is we're the number one sender for emails to college coaches. So this past year in 2024, we sent out 138,000 emails to college coaches directly for our families. This year will definitely outpace that. Probably get closer to a quarter million, maybe over and so what we've seen is that college coaches are opening these emails, they're clicking on these emails. The key points here is that you need to make sure that you avoid the spam filters. And so it just becomes very hard. I think if you're doing it by hand and sending emails by hand, it's not as much worth it unless you have specific schools that you want to try and check every possible avenue. But if you're doing things very detailed and you're making sure you're doing email best practices to get past these spam filters and get high deliverability rates, high open rates, high click rates, then it can't be worth it. Next one is ncsa. Now, NCSA does have their own platform where they kind of are a tool where you can send emails to college coaches. You can use it as a database, you can build your own profile. Over half of our families over at your first scholarship, I've worked with ncsa, so I just do have a little bit of insight from them. My understanding is that the database that they have is definitely top notch. It gives a lot of good insight and a lot of good data to help you make decisions on which schools might be a good fit. A couple issues that they do have. The email software that they use does not follow a lot of best practices. So when you email a coach or school through their platform, it will send that to multiple coaches in the form of one email. And oftentimes when you're sending that email, the coaches know this is coming from ncsa, so they just won't even read it in the first place. You're much better instead of using their platform to just email from your own email account. And I'm also not a big fan of their player profile stuff. I think it can be a little bit simpler way if you just wanted to send it directly to coaches. But really there's better platforms to kind of host a player profile and has a better chance of getting discovered by college coaches. Now this is a premium player profile, is 24. 7 sports. Or there's also Rivals. Now these are the kind of platforms or websites that rank players. And so when people talk about stars, they're talking about getting stars from these kind of places. Now in my mind, there's no other ranking service or recruiting service that is worth getting stars or rankings from because really I haven't had coaches bring up any kind of other rankings other than the ones from 24. 7 or Rivals. Now these are worth their weight in gold. If you can get stars or rankings from these sites that's amazing. The issue is that they're really only looking at the top of the top guys. So if you're not a Division 1 FBS guy, you're probably not going to get stars and rankings on there. So there's not a whole lot of focus or whole lot of like strategy that you can do there. Again, it's awesome if you can. It's a great place to get one of those, but it can be very outside of your control. And this takes me to the last platform believe is the best platform to get recruited by college football. That is X, previously known as Twitter. The reason why X is the best platform to get recruited is plain and simple. Every college coach is there. Shoot. Even Bill Belichick who just recently got hired on at unc made his own Twitter account just because he's the head coach of college football program. So every single college coach is there. It gives you amazing opportunities to get connected with these coaches and build direct relationships with them. On top of that, the algorithm is very friendly to post by recruit and will show in these coaches feeds. We've had multiple recruits who post great videos that only get a, you know, a couple thousand views, nothing too crazy. And then they're having coaches follow them and DM them and be seriously interested in them just from a single post as well as you have the ability to tag and DM these coaches to start conversations. Now like I was mentioning earlier, a lot of people think that Instagram is going to take over. I just haven't seen that yet. Maybe it will happen in the future, but for right now X is king. So if you're trying to get recruited to play college football, X is the place to be. And if you're trying to figure out like how do I do things on X, what's the best practice for that? We have a full video on best practices for X. Hopefully I'll put it somewhere around here, but if you want to check that out, that has a lot of good stuff in there and should get you started and should get you ahead of 99% of recruits on X. So that way you can stand out amongst the sea of recruits. And also if you want to just skip the line, get an unfair advantage and just work with us directly so where you can get the up to date strategies that are working right now, then consider joining your first scholarship. We have a done free exposure machine that saves you a ton of time by sending out emails and dms, all done within the best practices as well as we have full playbooks on each specific recruiting topic, we have a full one on how to create content for that YouTube channel and for your X profile according to your position and exact scripts on that and many, many other things that you probably couldn't even imagine but are extremely helpful in going to guarantee that you get a scholarship. So if you want to check that out again, the link is down below. Hopefully I'll see you in there soon. Peace.