For sports fans, the widespread presence of social media has been a way to augment the viewing of games and amplify the general fan experience with almost immediate commentary from writers, TV personalities, bloggers, discussion among fans, and even postgame comments from the athletes themselves.

But for coaches — especially at the amateur levels of high school and college — social media can be a cause of multiple headaches.

There have been continued concerns among coaches that social media serves as a distraction to players, and that young athletes may post content that makes the school or program look bad. Select top-level college programs like Louisville basketball, and Clemson and Florida State football went so far as to ban their players from Twitter in recent years, despite the First Amendment concerns such bans present.

Then, there's the issue of players getting recruited for colleges, where NCAA rules mean even a college's fans tweeting at a school's targeted recruits represents an NCAA violation. And until midnight Aug. 1, recruits' prospective college coaches could not "like," retweet or republish a high school student-athlete's social media content.

The rule change comes from the NCAA knowing it can't police all social media behavior while still wanting to prevent a Wild West atmosphere where coaching staffs could tweet at or message potential recruits all the time. Coaches still can't reply to or converse with prospects on social media, leading to the hashtag #ClickDontType.

Thus far, the reaction to the rule change has been mixed from coaches. However, it comes with potential pitfalls and benefits.

Benefit: Coaches can show recognition of a recruit

Most obviously, the new rules let coaching staffs show their interest in a recruit's life and sports season(s) without the more intrusive (and potentially annoying) outlawed forms of contact like messages and tweeting to players directly.

However, there is a risk of coaches overdoing it. Immediately after the midnight deadline passed, some recruits like University of Texas commit Kobe Boyce noticed their timelines were blowing up.

Recruits will often tweet when they've narrowed down their school choices. It's easy to see where members of a coaching staff could go overboard and retweet tons of content from a recruit after getting the word that the school is one of the finalist for the recruit's letter of intent.

Pitfall: Recruits expecting recognition by all coaches

It's no secret that some teams contain individual personalities that are more self-centered than others. That's been the case in sports for generations, but with the rise of extensive, year-round recruiting services, camps and media, a recruit's head has the potential to get bigger and bigger into the recruiting process.

With its inherently individual nature, social media is another vehicle that players could perhaps let go to their heads. Some recruits may expect schools to recognize what they post. If a college program or its coaches aren't that interested in social media, it could be a disadvantage that didn't exist at the beginning of the summer.

But for the college programs that perhaps aren't usually able to get the four- and five-star recruits, this "problem" could be a blessing in disguise.

"It's a fine line, because you don't want (a recruit) to be like 'why'd you retweet his stuff and not mine?' The flipside is a guy that's a little bit more worried about that might not be exactly the guy we're looking for," Boise State special teams coordinator Kent Riddle told the Idaho Statesman.

Benefit: Social media could be an X-factor in a recruit's decision

When the midnight Aug. 1 rule change came, TCU head coach Gary Patterson was working, and he personally retweeted recruits his staff is interested in. When asked about it, Patterson thought it could be a competitive advantage, especially as he's known as a coach who runs his own Twitter account.

"I knew I could be different because there were not going to be many head coaches doing it. ... A lot of kids that were up late [that] night were waiting for them. To me, it's valuable because of that," Patterson told USA Today. "Those kids know they matter to us."

Of course, this is a fine line with the previous point about about recruits' possible expectation to be recognized.

But, in the case of a coach like Patterson — who doesn't have an intern or social media coordinator running his Twitter account all or even some of the time — it can convey a different message versus a coach who does rely on someone else to run his or her social media and indiscriminately shares all content from a possible signee. It also may give a college coach a better way to relate to a recruit, since he's actually seeing what the student-athlete is saying on social media.

Pitfall: Sharing content from recruits who have committed to other schools

If you're reading this article, you almost surely know that verbal commitments to schools are nonbinding. Recruits have gone back and will continue to go back on those verbals from time to time, as is their right. Schools can also, unfortunately, rack up too many verbal commitments in a sport and have to pull their scholarship offer for an athlete.

All that being said, it's a pretty bad look if a school is openly recruiting an athlete that's already verbally recruited to another institution. It's even worse if a school is doing so on social media.

Yet, right after the midnight rule change on Aug. 1, Utah's football Twitter account retweeted Haskell Garrett, a top Ohio State commit:

Such use of social media for recruiting has the likely consequence of alienating most everyone involved — the athlete, his or her high school coach, and especially the school that's already received a verbal commitment.

It's possible that the NCAA's new rules on social media in recruiting will not be around for long, as an anonymous Big Ten assistant told ESPN. But for now, they're the rules of the game, and could be beneficial or harmful for coaches.