Going viral in not going viral.
Plus what's new on social. Read time: 4 mins.
Going viral in not going viral.
In my weekly conversations with coaches and athletic directors, there’s always a discussion about engagement metrics and the pursuit of content that creates likes, views, follows.
While creating nicely performing content is a good thing, it’s not the only thing.
In my opinion, the boring stuff that may not “pop off” on Instagram is the kind of content you need to win recruits to your program. It may not get thousands of views or a bunch of comments, but it’s essential to telling your story.
And it gets recruits in your inbox.
Now obviously, you want good content that creates growth in your audience over time, but you have to tell your story, even if it’s not packaged in a way that creates metric-focused performance.
You want recruits reaching out saying they saw your post on culture. Maybe it was straightforward, maybe it didn’t have trending audio, but it’s the type of thing that moves a conversation forward.
Two guideposts:
If you’re struggling to get account growth, lean 60-40 toward performing content (the stuff that may be edited to go viral).
If you’re building a growing account but are having trouble getting recruits to move forward, lean 60-40 away from performing content. Focus more on who we are and what we’re about in video and graphic (carousel) form.
If you’re in over your head on this, go here:
How do you plan your team's social over a calendar year?
Last month, I spoke about creating content buckets and focusing on what works to create better, more efficient content that helps you win. In that post, I talked about how you’ve got roughly three months to practice-practice-practice doing social better until your athletes leave campus. Since then, I’ve received two questions from coaches:
Sometimes, it's tough to keep up with all of the changes to social platforms. Here's the lowdown of what's new:
📹 Instagram reels: Longer long-form.
Your new time limit for reels is up to three minutes, up from 90 seconds. It’s a long-form world and we’re all just living in it.
📸 Instagram carousels: Testing an increase.
Right now, IG is testing an increase from 10 photos in a carousel to 15. We’ve seen carousels be the most-engaging type of content on Instagram in the past 18 months (even more than reels).
Having additional latitude to share in carousel form is only going to help share better stories for your program.
🧵 Threads has rolled out trending topics.
Join me on the app. It’s funnnn.
🎥 I just uploaded a YouTube video the other day and it asked me to disclose whether I used “altered content that seems real”.
This is an affront to the AI-posing-as-real-stuff corner of the internet. So if you’re hoping to add a virtual beach to your campus in Iowa, good luck getting that by YouTube and on to recruits.
Going Dancing.
We live in a time of Jack Gohlke-types that go off in March.
It’s one of the greatest times of the year for anyone invested in college sports. A D2 guy gets one D1 scholarship opportunity and parlays that into becoming a dragon slayer, downing Kentucky in round one of the NCAA Tournament with about 72 three pointers.
And then he gets an immediate NIL deal with TurboTax and shoots it in the ballroom of a Marriott. Wild.
As if you didn’t need more reasons, here’s what’s great about this:
Gohlke leaned into the “accountant” reputation and it paid off for him. He mentioned elsewhere that he was an Uber driver for college kids, but notice that Uber didn’t jump on the moment. Sometimes for brand, player, and program, you have to strike while the iron is hot.
He went from 500 IG followers to 60,000 as of today. His jackgohlkeNIL@gmail.com address on his profile most definitely contributed to his long-term success and NIL opportunities.
The video didn’t need to be pretty. In fact, the lack of polish helped it go viral.
The video didn’t need to be perfect. Let’s shoot on an iPhone and blur the Wilson logo from the ball after. No problem.
All of your best people have stories to share. Strike and move. Create and share.
Let this be a lesson. 🏆