The internet’s ‘hype guy’: How the nation’s top recruits are using TwitterBy Matt Mitchell

In today’s age of social media and recruiting, the ‘hype’ is everywhere. Did the nation’s top basketball recruit have the ‘dunk of the year’ during his team’s playoff win last night? If you follow high school hoops at all, you’ll probably see that clip retweeted on your timeline at least a few times the next day. How about one of the nation’s top high school quarterback’s throwing a last-second Hail Mary touchdown en route to a 400-yard 4-touchdown pass performance? That may very well end up on SportsCenter and therefore all over Twitter.

If you’re a top high school recruit, everyone is talking about you on social media. It can be pretty easy to get caught up in the hype. But what if that’s not necessarily a bad thing? By now, most sport organizations and athletes realize that social media platforms like Twitter are essentially free marketing and branding, and one of the most effective forms at that. If you have a large following and are an important figure in your sport, understanding this fact is fairly important.

Thankfully, most professional athletes realize this and have taken it in stride. The same can be said for a lot of college athletes, and, from what I’ve seen, high profile high school athletes as well.

The saying “with great power comes great responsibility” comes to mind. A lot of the nation’s top recruits realize the power they have on Twitter and have subsequently taken to this responsibility. Exactly how they’re using Twitter will be talked about in a bit, but first …

How important is recruiting, actually?

What makes a championship contender in today’s college sports landscape? Is it great coaching? Next-level facilities? A team’s proud tradition and national following? Well, it can certainly be all of these things, but it also comes down to one thing in particular: recruiting.

Sure, a team doesn’t have to always necessarily have a top 20 recruiting class every year to be competitive. Look at Oklahoma State’s football program, for example. Over the past ten seasons, the Cowboys have averaged 9.6 wins per season and have won at least 10 games six times during that span. This despite having an average 24/7Sports Composite class ranking of 33.2 during that span and only having a recruiting class sniff the top 30 on three occasions. Hey, hats off to Mike Gundy. He’s a terrific coach who knows how to get the most out of his players. But despite Oklahoma State’s success under Gundy, the Cowboys have never really been a true national title threat and most likely won’t ever be until they can recruit at a higher level. ‘Diamonds in the rough’ type players can only take a program so far.

Of the past ten football national champions, only Auburn (2010) and Clemson (2016) did not average a top 10 class during the four years prior to being crowned champions. It’s nearly impossible to win a national title if you don’t recruit at an elite level.

Or, you know, just have a generational talent at quarterback like Cam Newton or Deshaun Watson and you’re all set, too.

Sorry, Coach Gundy.

In college basketball, it’s a little different. Yes, the ‘blue blood’ programs still run the top of the recruiting rankings every year and usually dominate the regular season standings, but because of the more wide-open nature of the sport’s postseason, you’ll have a ‘Cinderella’ make a run every once in a while (looking at you, Sister Jean). You could argue recruiting matters less in college basketball than it does in college football, especially with all the ‘one-and-done’ players many claim are ‘ruining’ the sport. However, it doesn’t the change the fact that elite programs usually recruit the most elite talent and said programs are the ones that are usually picked to win it all.

The bottom line is this: if a program, whether in football and or basketball, wants to put itself in position to seriously contend for national championships, recruiting is one of the most sure-fire ways of doing just that.

Recruiting and the dawn of Twitter

Recruiting in college sports has changed quite a bit since the NCAA’s inception in 1906. At the time, the rules surrounding recruiting were that it wasn’t allowed—at all. Obviously, things have changed since then; teams and coaches continued to find different loopholes until eventually the NCAA decided to finally embrace recruiting, albeit with rules, because what’s the NCAA without rules?

The process was somewhat straight forward: a school tried to woo student-athletes by letters, phone calls, invitations to campus, and personal visits. The NCAA still had certain restrictions, like a set number of scholarships a team could offer or different contact periods with recruits, and a lot of schools tried to find ways around such restrictions, but the overall process remained the same.

Then social media happened.

The rise of social media changed the recruiting game, for better or worse. The schools and coaching staffs now had a whole new way to interact with recruits, and vice versa. Social media was a new avenue of two-way communication that didn’t exist before, and it allowed for interaction at any time and in any place.

In a lot of ways, social media was the new ‘Wild West,’ but the NCAA soon placed numerous regulations on its usage, just it does seemingly everything else. It had traditionally always been against NCAA rules to publicize any recruiting of a certain student-athlete, so the same rules were applied to social media. Coaches originally were only allowed to follow and private message recruits. The NCAA soon realized, however, that trying to monitor social media usage this way would be almost impossible, so they lifted those restrictions. As of 2016, coaches can now “like,” “retweet,” and “tag” recruits’ content on platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Nowadays, most coaches can often be seen on Twitter ‘liking’ and ‘retweeting’ all the recruits they follow. It’s clear social media has added a whole new dimension to the way in which schools and coaching staffs woo student-athletes. The same can also be said for the way student-athletes are now able to interact with many different audiences on these platforms. But what about college sports fans? How did they become so invested in the process?

Recruiting fandom goes mainstream

College sports fans are nothing if not passionate. One look at any online message board will tell you all you need to know.

That or just read through any top recruit’s Twitter mentions.

When it comes to how fans follow and interact with the nation’s top recruits in the social media age, some would say it’s gotten to become a little over-the-top. So how did this happen, exactly? How is it that even plenty of casual fans know just about everything there is to know about these 17 and 18-year-old high schoolers? Because 20 years ago, the only ones who knew things like a recruits’ 40-yard dash time or their mother’s hometown were the same guys playing fantasy baseball in their basements with only a pencil and paper.

If there is one company in particular that can be credited most with this influx in online recruiting fandom over the past two decades, it’s probably Rivals.com.

Founded in 1998, Rivals is a network of websites that mainly focuses on football and basketball recruiting. Rivals started by offering online access to recruiting rankings and other sources of information and coverage that had not really been available to the ‘average’ fan before. Being the first website of its kind, Rivals grew very popular and soon started offering a $10 per month subscription service offering access to member-only message boards, highlights, and other breaking recruiting news. Rivals soon began offering team-specific sites dedicated mainly to ‘Power Five’ teams. After some growth and some decline, the Rivals network was eventually bought by Yahoo! in 2007 for a reported $100 million, a few years after Scout.com, another similar website, was bought by Fox in 2005. The models for these websites proved fans are more than willing to pay for recruiting coverage, marketing these sites as big time money-makers and a multi-million-dollar industry in itself.

The success of Rivals and Scout.com, soon spawned other similar recruiting coverage websites, one of the them being 247Sports.com, which has in many ways surpassed its predecessors. 247Sports was initially started by two Alabama fans merely as a hobby, before becoming what it is today. A mere two years after its launch, 247Sports announced a partnership with CBS Sports in 2012. A year later, it replaced Rivals.com as the official online partner of the U.S. Army All-American Bowl and the National Combine. This rapid growth led to CBS acquiring the site in 2015, which would later acquire Scout.com. 247Sports is now seen by many as the ‘go-to’ for rankings, coverage, and highlights.

These three networks of sites have caused recruiting coverage to truly go mainstream. The information and coverage these sites provide are both plentiful and easily available, with most fans more than willing to pay for it if need be. Whether it’s highlights, rankings, or any other breaking recruiting news, even the average fan now has all the tools necessary to become a recruiting ‘expert.’

Yes, interest in recruiting is still very much a regional thing. Obviously, fans of bigger schools and, in particular, SEC teams are probably going to care more than fans on the West Coast. This is probably best evidenced by the fact that 247Sports was started as an Alabama fan site. Nonetheless, the information is out there for the fans who truly want it, and a lot fans do.

If you’re reading through a recruits’ Twitter mentions wondering why all these people care so much, you can go ahead and blame the three aforementioned websites. The coverage they provide has pretty much made these high-school kids into celebrities. A lot of high-profile recruits now realize just how invested fans are, and this is possibly reflected in how they are using Twitter.

Twitter usage among recruits

By now, it’s easy to see how coaches, schools, and fans are using social media; just follow any big name coach on Twitter and scroll through their timeline from past few months. But what about the student-athletes? Particularly those being recruited at the highest level. How are these high school kids, with ever increasing online followings and a level of influence many in their same position didn’t have 15 years ago, using this powerful tool?

Well for starters, many high school recruits aren’t using Twitter for creating their own content. Instead, they’re primarily using it to share or ‘retweet’ content from other accounts.

This data was pulled from a content analysis which examined a total of 1580 tweets taken from 79 Twitter accounts from recruits in the top 30 of ESPN’s Top 100 rankings for football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball. The data shows, overwhelmingly, that recruits are using Twitter as a way of sharing content rather than creating their own. The recruits analyzed prefer to share what others are saying about them, so they don’t have to say it themselves. In a lot of ways, Twitter is basically just one big internet ‘hype guy.’

Exactly what type of content are recruits sharing/tweeting out though? The analysis of the data further broke down the numbers by different content categories, placing tweets into one to three of six different categories.

The six categories, displayed below, are: interactivity (any tweet that is an athlete’s interaction with fans, coaches, media, etc.), diversion (any tweet that is non-sports-related), information-sharing (any tweet sharing information about themselves, their team, teammates, other high school athletes, or just their sport in general), content (a tweet that contains any form of a picture, video, link, or GIF), fanship (any tweets about a sport or athlete not their own or their teammates’, so tweets about college or professional sports), and promotion (any tweet about an upcoming team event/game, or an upcoming event they’re participating in, or just tweets meant to ‘hype’ themselves, such as highlight mixtapes or a clip of dunk a recruit had in a game).

The data shows high-profile high school recruits are using Twitter mainly as a way to promote/share information about themselves or their teams, as well as tweeting out content such as pictures, videos, or links. They want the people who follow their accounts to know how awesome they are; they want followers to know they’re going to be a McDonald’s All-American, or that they dunked over an entire team in last night’s game. Twitter is the perfect avenue for getting the word out.

Not surprisingly, they aren’t using Twitter only to talk about sports, hence the diversion, or non-sports category, being the third highest. I mean, these are still high school kids after all; they do have other interests (memes and vines). Nonetheless, these recruits clearly understand, just as teams and coaches now do, that Twitter can be a powerful promotional and information-sharing tool.

So what type of content are they tweeting or retweeting the most? What type of information are they primarily sharing? And are they primarily focusing on promoting themselves more or their teams?

Well, it seems videos are pretty popular, with pictures and links somewhat close behind, and GIFs, well, yeah. This isn’t that big a surprise, really. The rise of sports fandom on Twitter has changed the way fans and athletes alike consume content. A new sort of ‘highlight’ culture has taken over sports Twitter. It’s hard to watch a game while scrolling through your Twitter feed and not see everyone freaking out over some monster dunk LeBron James had or a nice spin-move a running back put on a defender.

Short highlight clips have become extremely popular on Twitter, and this applies to high school players as well. There are now many Twitter accounts dedicated solely to tweeting out the best highlights from high school sports around the country. With many of these high profile recruits being the subjects of a lot of these highlights, it makes sense they’d be sharing these highlights.

This would also help explain why the number of self-promotion and self-information sharing tweets are so high, as a lot times these three categories all directly coincided. These high school recruits seem to value to ability Twitter has given them to both promote themselves as well share information. In many cases, they’ll often keep fans and followers updated on their own recruiting process.

Social media, and particular Twitter, gives recruits the ability to inform their followers in a way that wasn’t really possible before, and it seems they’re taking full advantage of this.

The interaction and fanship categories were the last two categories, in terms of the percent of the analyzed tweets they made up. Basically, a lot of the nation’s top recruits aren’t really doing a whole lot of tweeting about things that aren’t relevant to them or their high school teams. When they do tweet about other teams, players, or sports, it’s usually either about college teams that are recruiting them or some of the biggest name in professional sports like, LeBron James. Even though they’re athletes, they’re also fans like the rest of us, they just tend to keep their fandom on Twitter to a minimum.

When interacting with others on Twitter, recruits’ interactions are usually nothing more than the generic ‘thank-you’s’ or ‘congrats bro’ and not many actual conversations with fans, other athletes, or other followers. Still, at the very least they understand the importance of stewardship on social media, which you could say is another form of good PR.

Social media can basically give followers 24/7 access to athletes’ lives. While this has mostly been a positive development as a whole, there have been some cases where this has backfired, like recent NFL first-round draft pick Josh Allen, for example. By and large, however, it seems most of the nation’s high-profile recruits are getting a lot smarter and more savvy about how they use platforms like Twitter. They seem to realize it can be a valuable tool more than just a plaything for when they’re bored. More than anything, for athletes, Twitter can also be one hell of a ‘hype guy.’