For a good part of America, college football owns Saturdays in the fall. So as we have done with other leadership groups, we decided to take a look at how engaged college football coaches at the top 131 programs are on social.
Our colleague Tanner Simkins of the Complete SET Agency did the digging, and the results were both surprising and interesting as it looks like those leaders patrolling the Saturday sidelines are the MOST ENGAGED, especially on Twitter, than any other set of coaches in any other sport, college or professional. Social and college football seem to rule the day.
Some of the numbers we found:
Of the 131, and amazing 120 were active on Twitter in some way, and all of the 120 have either actively posted original content or have retweeted team or school related content in the past two weeks.
Leading the way was Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh and his 2.1 million followers, while Ohio State’s Urban Meyer was second with 1.9 million followers. From there was a pretty big drop off to Miami’s Mark Richt at just shy of 500k, but no less than 25 college coaches gave solid followings of over 100,000, an audience that is both robust and ripe for activation. Others uniquely engaged are Arizona State’s Herm Edwards and Penn State’s James Franklin, whose twitter feeds clearly have their personality and style in mind.
Taking out the top three, the average number of followers is still much larger than any other group of coaches, easily in the 50 to 60 k range.
On Instagram the engagement is much less, but still 37 have active accounts, much more than any other group of coaches, owners of GM’s in sport in North America.
So who is not active on social? One that surprised was Clemson’s Dabo Sweeney, given all the commitment the Tigers have put into social overall.
Others maybe not so surprisingly are Alabama’s Nick Saban and UCLA’s Chip Kelly, bit for the most part this is a pretty interested and engaged group.
Now are coaches posting themselves?
Probably not, and definitely not all the time, and a good amount of the posts and retweets are pretty benign or revolve around recruiting or game day rituals. Maybe it’s because of staff size that college football coaches are using social more, maybe it’s a case of follow the leader, maybe it’s a concerted push, but if you are a fan, a brand, or a platform looking to find engagement, look to college football coaches, who are setting a surprising standard for others to follow.
