LSU football coach Les Miles congratulated top-three NFL draft pick Tyson Jackson, wished former LSU wide receiver Demetrius Byrd a speedy recovery after his car accident and bragged about LSU’s performance in the annual spring football game. Miles didn’t do these things at a press conference or radio interview but during a five-day span using his new Twitter account. The trendy Web site Twitter.com has grown by 1,382 percent from February 2008 to February 2009, according to Nielsen, resulting in an increase of about 6.56 million new unique visitors during that time frame. Now several athletic departments are catching onto the trend, using the platform to update fans and reach out to recruits.USC coach Pete Carroll, Georgia coach Mark Richt and Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin already frequent their Twitter accounts. LSU sports information director Michael Bonnette manages Miles’ account by receiving info from Miles then posting updates at the coach’s discretion.LSU — as an athletic department — has a separate account that posts news and score updates. As of Thursday, Miles has 431 people who receive his Twitter updates. “He’s always recruiting savvy so he understands the big picture, and he understands this is another way to touch the fans but also potentially to reach prospects,” Bonnette said of Miles.Meanwhile, college athletic programs realize they need to be careful to uphold NCAA recruiting rules. The NCAA board of directors approved a ban in April 2007 that disallows coaches to text message recruits.But users who subscribe to someone’s Twitter account can have that person’s messages — or ‘tweets’ — sent to their mobile device. The specifics on the text message ban are outlined in NCAA bylaw 13.4.1.2. “As long as the coaches are not using Twitter to contact individual prospective student-athletes and are abiding by other recruiting rules, such as discussing specific recruits, there is not an issue with them using Twitter,” NCAA associate director for public and media relations Cameron Schuh said in an e-mail to The Daily Reveille. Bill Smith, Arkansas assistant athletic director for new media, said he doesn’t think the NCAA will place any direct sanctions on athletic departments’ use of Twitter. Arkansas’ athletic department has one of the more active Twitter pages among Southeastern Conference schools, updating it more than 600 times since it started using the software this year. “Your coaches aren’t going to tweet out, ‘Boy, I went to visit Bill Smith’s high school today, and that Bill Smith is a great athlete,’ because they couldn’t say that in any other format,” Smith said. “But they could certainly talk about how great their school is.” Other coaches, such as South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier, likely won’t be using Twitter anytime soon, said Eric Nichols, marketing director at South Carolina. But the Gamecocks’ athletic department has sent out nearly 3,500 tweets, the most among SEC schools using Twitter.”The thing that makes Twitter work is its authenticity,” Nichols said. “If you have random,  boring tweets that are written from a [graduate assistant], not from a coach, it’s not going to work.”—-Contact Kyle Whitfield at [email protected]