For sport psychology practitioners there has been a resulting increase in the demands for communication with their athletes, players, teams, squads, colleagues, and employers using social media platforms. There has also been a significant increase in the use of video communication platforms (e.g., Skype, FaceTime, Facebook Messenger). Tools such as Twitter have also become increasingly important for sharing scholarly and professional information (Verhagen, Bower, & Khan, 2014), although from a professional perspective, there can be issues with this easy access to information as these sources do not undergo any quality control (MacNamara & Collins, 2015). There is also evidence that most conversations on social media are no longer simply text-based but involve images or video (Cotterill, 2019a). Key questions for sport psychology consultants include: How to use the technology? What platforms to use? Ethical questions about whether you should correspond with athletes under the age of 18? Should you share photos and videos? Can you separate your professional and private versions of you? How accessible should you be? What impact is social media and digital technology having on the communication expectations of clients? In addition, there is also the issue of the impact of social media on athlete performance, with research suggesting that engagement with social media prior to performance can influence performance outcomes (Miah, 2012). In this chapter, I will explore the challenges and opportunities that novel technological tools and social media present to sport psychology practitioners and how advances in software and hardware can be utilized by practitioners to maximize behavior change and performance. I will also discuss the professional, ethical, and moral challenges that these new platforms can present to sport psychology practitioners and the importance of effectively managing your online footprint.
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