ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Twitter has impacted the way in which information spreads, with news breaking on Twitter prior to other media formats. The world of college football recruiting is no different, where breaking announcements and news spread via tweets before message boards and websites. “The announcement of a top college recruit planning to attend a specific school is huge,” says Kevin Duffey, a co-founder of DirectSnap.com, a new recruiting site launched on December 28th, 2011. Duffey continued, “Die-hard recruiting fans and casual fans alike want to know immediately when a player announces he’s heading to their school. Twitter is where the news hits and the first reactions are spread.”
Twitter is the perfect medium for instant news updates, but it can be overwhelming for users seeking specific information about a topic such as college football recruiting. DirectSnap solves this problem with cutting-edge technology by accumulating and filtering the thousands of recruiting messages communicated via Twitter each day. “During the three-day span surrounding the two large high school All-American football games, DirectSnap processed 46,434 tweets about these top recruits,” said Drew Roberts, another DirectSnap co-founder. Within milliseconds, these tweets are parsed, filtered and displayed on the corresponding DirectSnap.com pages for fans.
By visiting a DirectSnap team page, fans can instantly become familiar with which players a team has successfully recruited, or is in the process of courting. The Alabama Crimson Tide page, for example, streams only tweets about the top recruits that are applicable to Alabama. On the same page, fans can see which recruits are the most discussed recruits for the team.
DirectSnap imports the rankings from the established recruiting services to give users an indication on how the recruiting experts judge each player’s talent level. Additionally, DirectSnap offers the unique feature of allowing users to see “Buzz Levels” which indicate how much a player is talked about on Twitter compared to other recruits. “DirectSnap.com offers fans the unique ability to view everything they want for a specific recruit including talent-based rankings, buzz levels surrounding their recruitment, highlight videos and, of course, real-time Tweet updates,” said Kevin Duffey.
Visitors have the ability to filter tweets in streams to view only those users that work full-time in the recruiting world. These reporters provide a higher standard of accuracy in the information they share and are currently marked in the system as “experts" with a green icon next to their tweets. “We feel some recruiting fans only want insight from trusted recruiting experts. By allowing users to filter the tweet stream to only show information from top sources, DirectSnap users can have the best of both worlds,” said Kevin Duffey. On each recruit profile, visitors can also filter streams to show only tweets mentioning one of the recruit’s top five schools.
INTERESTING TRENDS
The tweet data on these top recruits allows DirectSnap to provide pertinent information about recruiting. “We look forward to sharing this information with interested members of the media. Information such as how many times a recruit is mentioned on twitter during the press conference where he makes his announcement, and plenty of other interesting facts,” says Drew Roberts, the main contact at DirectSnap for media inquiries.
SHARING RECRUITING INFORMATION
For newspaper reporters, high school coaches, and those working in the college football recruiting industry, sharing breaking information about top recruits is easy. By mentioning a recruit’s first and last name on twitter and spelling it correctly, DirectSnap will automatically use that tweet in the system. The system has spam thresholds and other filtering processes to cull out tweets that do not provide relevant information. Each user is rated based on the quality and frequency of information shared — the top Twitter contributors are then listed on each page (as “Power Sources”) whether it is specific to a recruit, a team or a conference.
ABOUT DIRECTSNAP
DirectSnap is held by Revelation Media LLC. Revelation Media is also the holding company for Saturday Down South, the largest SEC Football website. For information about DirectSnap, visit DirectSnap.com