For today’s high school athlete, using social media is as important as breathing.
Yet incredibly, the vast majority of student athletes fail to use social media in a way that helps their athletic careers.
For them, Snapchat and Instagram are for messaging friends. They don’t see social media for what it can be: a tool that can highlight the positive and unique aspects of who they are as athletes and people.
The vast majority of student athletes fail to use social media in a way that helps their athletic careers.
One reason is that student athletes don’t realize themselves what they have to offer. They certainly don’t know how to combine that special gift with social media to help their potential careers. They’re not alone.
Professional athletes have the same problem.
What We Take for Granted
Early on in our work with NFL safety Earl Thomas at Athlete Interactive, we stumbled across an interesting statistic. Opposing teams were so afraid of Earl that they practically stopped throwing to the middle of the field, where he spent most of his time on defense.
Earl didn’t see that fact as anything special. To him, it just meant that he was doing his job to the best of his ability.
We saw it as something very different. It was almost like the other team was forbidden to go where Earl was. So in an homage to Area 51, the top secret U.S. government base where UFO secrets are allegedly stored, we came up with a name for the portion of field that Earl protected: Area 29, after his jersey number.
Earl began to use the hashtag #Area29 in his posts, and by the end of the season, it had become a commonplace term among Seattle Seahawks fans on social media. They also knew what it meant: Throw the ball near Earl Thomas at your own peril.
Every student athlete has something in their own story on or off the field like #Area29—a quality about themselves that they take for granted, but that others might value. It’s especially hard for a young person to identify these unique strengths because their knowledge of themselves in relation to the world is fairly limited.
When student athletes are taught to identify those unique elements of who they are, and then coached to use social media to highlight them, they can open doors to collegiate opportunities and beyond in ways they would never have imagined.