Social media can be a marketing boom for Michigan State athletes - or something they avoid to stay private
Christian Williams, a Michigan State baseball catcher and designated hitter, is a redshirt senior in his fifth year. Many of his friends and teammates have chosen to get in the spotlight and make a name for themselves through social media, but he has no problem being the odd one out.
He prefers to keep a private Instagram account, only shared with family and friends.
Social media has quickly become one of the fastest growing tools for athletes to create a platform, produce content, engage with audiences and capitalize on opportunities such as NILs (Name, Image, and Likeness). However, they must have a public media presence to earn deals.
Williams understands his choice to be low-profile comes at a cost.
“The push to be on social media and do NILs is so big. I never had any desire to do it, but after having so many meetings for it I feel like I have to do it,” said Williams. “I go to these meetings where it’s like I’m missing out on a big opportunity, or I have to do this to be able to build a platform.
“At the end of the day it’s still not something I want to do. I don’t want to put my personal life on display for people to see and open up my life for people I don’t even know to comment on.”
However, for MSU sophomore cross country and track runner Mia Rogan, spotlight isn’t an issue. In 12 months, she gained over 70,000 followers on her Instagram account @mia_rogan, from engaging with her audience. She’s gone viral from videos such as vlogs, dance trends, running and meet day transition videos which has brought her more NIL opportunities.
“You have to have more followers, more engagement and grind for it,” she said. “I have to post constantly; there’s no weeks off.”
Rogan is driven to post by inspiring her audience and seeking the positive impact she can have on others. She’s landed multiple NIL deals including NCAA’s NIL Empower Program, Kiloh and Co (a sports apparel brand), JBL (speaker brand), Biggby Coffee, and Michigan State University Federal Credit Union.
“I enjoy posting and sharing my life and passions with people,” said Rogan. “Money is nice, but seeing how I can influence this next generation of female athletes definitely outweighs the negativity and creepy people out there on social media.”
Rogan recognizes how much harder she has to work towards gaining engagement and exposure from being a content creator and athlete of a female and non-revenue sport. She gets equal pay as male athletes from revenue sports within the same brand deals, even if their following and social media presence might be significantly smaller than hers.
“I did a recent deal with some football players who have less followers, didn’t have to reach out and got paid the exact same as me,” said Rogan. “Hearing and seeing how they get offered more deals just shows a big difference.”
Payment is based on an athlete’s NIL value which is determined by popularity, athletic achievements, and social media following. Rogan receives fixed payments per post and has been able to increase revenue as her following skyrocketed.
“When I first started I would get $100 to $200 per deal and now it’s over $1,000,” she said.
Being an influencer and having a large fanbase can bring unwanted and uncalled for remarks from the public. It isn’t prominent for Rogan anymore since she’s gotten used to disregarding ill-mannered comments.
“I have had some creepy comments and DMs, but I don’t pay attention to them anymore,” she said. “You have to stay level headed and not read into it too much.
“When I first started posting, I’d read every comment constantly and was always thinking how weird they are. Now I only look at comments from my mutual friends and positive ones that are at the top.”
Athletes aren’t the only ones who get opportunities through social media. Its easy access provides anyone, anonymous or not, with the freedom to comment just about anything they please, many of which fall under harassment, violence, and perpetration.
“They’re people first and they happen to have a really cool job that puts them in the spotlight,” Williams said. “Society puts athletes on a pedestal and dehumanizes them in a way where they talk about them and forget they’re people first.
“People hide behind a screen and make comments without thinking how it’d affect a real person to see them.”
NCAA study finds social media harassment of athletes is a significant issue
A recently published research study spells out a reality many NCAA athletes know to be true: there is significant online harassment towards athletes from the public. The organization partnered with Signify Group to categorize, investigate online harassment and enhance online safety in college athletics after hearing significant feedback on the issue from athletes and coaches, starting in March 2023.
“We were hearing more and more reports from student athletes sharing information with media or coaches who saw how toxic the sports culture was getting, especially with a lot of change in laws around legalizing sports betting,” said Clint Hangebracuk, NCAA Managing Director of Enterprise Risk Management.
“There was a lot more abuse and harassment, particularly on social media directed at student athletes, coaches, or officials and we wanted to get our hands around how prevalent this is and how it changes among different sports.”
Signify Group used public data and artificial intelligence analyzed by data scientists, strategists, and public affairs specialists to identify issues towards building better policies. They previously worked with FIFA and athletes from the U.S. Open, WNBA, and NBA to monitor and report social media abuse.
“They have direct relationships with social media companies and law enforcement to know the information needed on how to get content removed and users banned,” said Hangebrauck.
NCAA and Signify released their findings in October, based upon comments across X, Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok, specifically focused on championships from Division I women’s volleyball, FCS and FBS football, men’s and women’s March Madness basketball, gymnastics, softball, and baseball.
The study revealed the most prevalent type of abuse targeted at male and female athletes was sexual. March Madness athletes received 80% of abuse found in the study and women received three times as many threats than their male counterparts.
Instagram, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company (Meta), is the only major social media platform with self-moderation privacy controls and detection features in place to flag comment harassment.
“Ideally if social media companies were doing their job, we wouldn’t need Signify to police their platforms for them and force feed the findings to have it taken down,” said Hangebrauck.
References
NCAA study:
https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/ncaa/wagering/NCAAThreatMatrixPilotStudyPublicReport.pdf
Signify mission: