Football and social media are perfect bed-fellows. Football teams command great allegiance from their fans and accordingly strong communities are built – each community gathering online to discuss their team’s latest game / transfer / scandal. For the majority, the online community is the only way they can connect with other fans given only a minority of fans have the chance to go to a live match.
So the big question for football teams is how can they maximise the potential of these latent communities, and the social (and £) capital within them. As a starter, last week we ran some desk research looking at how socially connected the Premiership clubs were – and for fun we’ve created the “Social Media Premiership” – charting how the various teams rank, based around some social media basics: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.
Man City are arguably way in front of the competition at the top of the league – where I’m sure Roberto Mancini would love to be in the real league. Although they haven’t traditionally had the biggest supporter-base of the Premiership teams, they’ve impressively built strong online ties with their core fan-base.
At the bottom of the league you’ve got Tottenham who inexplicably don’t have any official social media presence at all, which I’d hope will change in the coming months as it’s bizarre for a club to ignore the potential of social media.
Having said that, getting your social media strategy right isn’t as easy as you’d think, especially when it comes to maximising value re: cold hard sales – something that all Premiership clubs are no doubt keen to do. So maybe Tottenham’s social media reticence is down to a tactical slow and steady approach – pretty similar to Everton’s progress in the real league this year ; – )
*Notes on the research data: all data was collated the week ending 5th February. The number in brackets represents their league position at that time, and the blog numbers came from Google blog search. All other data came from the specified channel source.
Posted By
ChrisQ