Break it Down: Twitter Use of AFL Clubs
17. Feb, 2010 
20 Comments
In the current series I’m doing on social media I’m following my post last week on the best users of social media in Australian sport, in particular the AFL; here is the data that was used to come to the conclusion. I conducted data collection on a random week of the AFL season, starting on 07:00 09/02/2010 in the lead up to the first week of the NAB Cup Season and concluded as of the following Monday, 15/02/2010 at 21:00.
The whole purpose of this study was to get a better understanding of which, but more importantly how teams are successfully engaging their fans through the use of social media.
In an earlier post I highlighted what I consider social media best practice to be, and how teams can achieve this.
What is Social Media Best Practice?
- Be consistent: Throughout your social media ‘footprint’, consistency is key. If you have uploaded a video, post the link to your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts. Not all members of each platform are members of the other, so the same message needs to be relayed to all fans – this also applies to direct E-Marketing.
- Be yourself: Fans come to your site for transparency, for something unique that they can’t achieve through traditional outlets such as press releases or website news. They want that extra special something that makes them feel like a fly on the wall.
- Be active: Online users will often come to your website two or three times a day. If you are not posting news or links on a daily basis your consumers will go elsewhere. You need to stay active to keep the attention of your users even in down times. ‘Content is King’ and one must entertain his subjects.
- ‘Dialogue not monologue’: Create fan polls, react to comments posted on forums, articles or Tweets, become engaged in what the customer is saying. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, so allow your consumers plenty of opportunity to place feedback. If a fan has an ‘authentic interaction’ with an athlete or celebrity this is an incredible experience for them and often can strengthen the bond, between brand and consumer, club and fan.
- Spread the word: You have an online community or ‘e-tribe’, so use them. Encourage your users to retweet messages, use Digg as a method of spreading the gospel of your website or even give away prizes for fans that use your brand in a Twitter #hashtag or Facebook update. This will ‘activate’ other fans and they too will become part of your community.
As we look forward to the next stages of social media, we need to be wary of a few things:
- Sponsor and product integration: How can this be achieved without it becoming a marketing campaign and eventually turns fans away?
- Commercialisation of social media: How can you turn your loyal fan base into a paying fan base online through the building of applications for smart phones, or member-only based services?
These are the point’s I’m going to focus on, not only the quantity (anybody can tweet all day) but the quality of the communication; how did the teams’ tweets impact the end users? How involved were the teams with their fans? Were sponsors integrated into teams’ tweets? Etc.
Get ready for some graphs…
Total tweets
There are two stand-out performers here, both Essendon and St. Kilda recorded 77 tweets for the week. Essendon played West Coast on Friday resulting in 58 tweets throughout the day. St. Kilda had an intra-club practice match which resulted in 41 tweets on the day. Next was North Melbourne with a respectable 42 tweets (not including any match days) and Fremantle with 25 tweets for the week.
Brisbane was the only active account not to register any activity during the week, even though they had a match on Sunday. As covered in my last post, the Western Bulldogs are yet to enter the world of Twitter.
Update: I have since been told the Brisbane Lions account is not an official one, please regard all their data now as coming from an unofficial account.
I also had a stat called ‘after hours tweet’ which basically translates to ‘who is taking their job home with them’ (or working really late)? I considered 6pm-9am an after hours tweet and in this category St. Kilda and North dominated, more than tripling both Essendon and Melbourne who came in a tie for third.
Plugging the sponsors
On the official Hawthorn Twitter page, in their background they list links to their official website, Facebook, Twitter and email address as well as getting a good plug to their major sponsor, Tasmania. Every single follower who views the Hawks page gets an imprint of the sponsors’ logo - great work Hawks! This was easily the best layout of any Twitter page. The Kangaroos also have web and facebook links, however the next line which has details for memberships has been cut off in their background image. Sadly you can’t scroll down the image as its a static background image, that will need to be fixed.
Want to get some extra bang for your sponsors’ buck? Create a Twitter list of all your corporate partners’ Twitter accounts so your fans can get easy access. Can’t think of any players or personalities for a #followfriday? How about all your corporate partners! Simple measures like these will allow you to subtly integrate your sponsors into your social media campaigns without it becoming too much of a pitch to your fans.
Use of multimedia
This is where St. Kilda and North break away from the pack, this high quality use of tweets is what separates the great from the good. The majority of St. Kilda images were either taken at the intra-club practice match or the official season launch; all behind-the-scenes action that allows the regular fan who cannot make either event feel that little bit closer to the team. The Kangaroos, on the other hand, posted a variety of images which included some at training, behind-the-scenes media action or players at the family day. The ability to supply fans with behind-the-scenes material comes back to the ‘fly on the wall’ mentality, which is ultimately what any die-hard fan wants to see.
While they may not have shown it this week, Collingwood has historically been great with behind-the-scenes tweets such as images from the office, training or at social functions. There are so many opportunities for images to be taken within a football club, such as in the office or membership department, at training, team meetings, at matches and social functions such as family days or season launches.
North Melbourne uses its Facebook group extremely well to share and host their videos. High quality videos, behind-the-scenes action (getting players involved in a lot of them!) as well as strategic cross-promotion of the Twitter account.
Opening up the conversation
‘Dialogue, not monologue’ is what I believe leads to a successful social media campaign; there must be interaction between the club and its fans. Essendon is the winner in this case with 39 of its 77 posts being directed to or re-tweets of fans. The Adelaide Crows, who actually have the most followers of all 16 AFL teams, did not record a single ‘@’ to their fans during this seven day period (which included their first match of the season).
Spicing up the competitions
How can the implementation of competitions work? Typically an online contest involve filling out of a form and signing up to an e-newsletter that eventually just ends up spamming your inbox with useless junk after you lose the contest.
Twitter competitions can bring your fans back to your site and then, through the use of re-tweets, actually have the potential to attract news fans. Recently, St. Kilda’s Twitter account offered two tickets to its upcoming NAB Cup match against Collingwood by showing a portion of a player, and getting fans to tweet back who they thought the player was to win the competition. They ran a second competition on Wednesday with a simple ‘tell us why in 25 words or less’ entry – a perfect competition for the restrictive 140 characters of Twitter.
Within 10 minutes there was a happy winner, but the best part about this competition is that anyone could have entered, so now St. Kilda is pulling in fans from other teams. This week, North Melbourne is asking users to tweet their favourite Kangaroos photo to win tickets to the upcoming NAB cup game. This will allow the average fan, who may only currently use their social media for personal reasons, to stumble across the account and become a fan/follower. Only 12 teams currently do such linking, not surprisingly those falling behind by not doing so include Brisbane, Richmond and Western Bulldogs.
Opening yourself up to feedback
Essendon has a ‘your comments’ section on each of its news articles which allows fans an extra level of involvement by joining their own social network ‘the hangar‘. However there can be problems when fans begin to argue with each other or even yet bag the club. Club’s need to be aware that if you open yourself up to comments, you’re effectively creating a mini-forum which must be then regulated, as not all comments are family-friendly. Be prepared for a bit more work once the comments come flying in.
Converting offline fans to online followers
When comparing the membership database from 2009 to current social media figures, (combining the largest Facebook group/page with total fans of a Twitter account) Essendon has the best conversion rate of members to social media fans with a rate of 0.97 social media fans to every one member. From there Adelaide comes in second, Sydney third and Collingwood fourth. Admittedly some fans may double up or be fans from other clubs, but it does give an interesting perspective on the ability to convert fans in general to their social media accounts.
Using the gifts you’re given
‘Spreading the word’ takes on new forms on Twitter as any popular topic can become ‘trending’ which means it appears on the right-side of the Twitter homepage to every single user of Twitter. The only team ever to achieve this? Essendon Football Club after their one-point win over the Saints. Previously Essendon has run with a hashtag and that is what trended.
Now St. Kilda has picked up the virtual ball (hashtag) and ran with it since. Accompanying over 85% of their tweets was a hashtag, typically ‘#gosaints’. This tag develops a consistent theme to their digital media strategy and allows fans to get involved by adding the hashtag to their own tweets. Fans can then search via the ”#gosaints’ tag and see other users that have recently tweeted out the same message. The Kangaroos are currently the second most prolific user of a hashtag with theirs being ‘#nmfc’, allowing fans to join in the chorus conversation. The AFL, too, is promoting game hashtags as they recently have started asking for any users who are tweeting about or from an AFL game to end with ‘#aflteam1team2′.
The Ladder
The bit you might have been waiting for or just skipped down to because you didn’t want to read any more graphs… I will give my ladder for their work on Twitter of all 16 teams.
- St. Kilda
- Essendon
- North Melbourne
- Sydney
- Collingwood
- Adelaide
- Hawthorn
- Carlton
- West Coast
- Fremantle
- Melbourne
- Port Adelaide
- Richmond
- Brisbane
- Geelong
- Western Bulldogs
On the quantitative side we have seen that Essendon, St.Kilda and North Melbourne are the three best for producing tweets while Richmond, Brisbane and Western Bulldogs came in the bottom three (note: Geelong doesn’t tweet officially but their unofficial account is quite active).
However, it’s not all about quantity - anyone can tweet all day; it all really depends on the quality of the message. If a team were to send out 10 tweets in a day, but all 10 were simply re-hashing links from its own official website or other news stories, is that engaging the fan? Not really…
On the qualitative side, we have found that Essendon is highly active in engaging their fans and have given team merchandise discounts to its social media fans turning tweets into $’s. St. Kilda uses great media through the posting of images or videos (on Twitpic, Facebook or hosting sites) and North Melbourne is a polished all-round performer and that’s why they came top three on my ladder.
What drives people to a website and then back again, is ultimately content – Carey content is king! – and these three teams all regularly exhibit great content and are strong examples of what I consider to be social media best practice.
Think I’m crazy? Hate the ladder? Or want to tell me what you think makes for a good social media strategy? Let me know in the comments.
i thought the best thing St Kilda did was convert a supporter to a member over twitter. one of their followers was unsure if he was going to sign up and posted it on twitter. St Kilda were quick on the mark (with the benefit of being at the Season Launch at the time of the tweet) and sent a twitpic of two players (i think Stephen Milne and Zac Dawson) holding up a sign imploring the follower to become a member – which he subsequently did!
Ha, that’s brilliant! If that can’t get him to sign up what will? All these little things count.
Anthony, not sure it is a good idea to also group fansites (facebook or Twitter) with the official ones and then use that as a basis for comparison.
Probably best to leave those out altogether. None of the Twitter or facebook accounts purporting to be the Brisbane Lions are official.
That is a good point Daniel. Re: Brisbane and their twitter account, I was under the belief that it was an official account and since I’ve posted this I’ve been told otherwise so I will change that soon, guess that means they don’t have an official one? Would love someone at the club to contact me so I can change it. In regards to the facebook accounts, I went with either each team’s ‘official group/page’ such as Carlton and Kangaroos who advertise as their official, or simply the biggest one (members wise) on facebook. Trying to give a perspective of how aware the clubs’ fans are of their social media. Thanks for the feedback
Anthony, phone 07 3335 1777 and ask for Sam Lord. He can confirm that those accounts are not official.
Already spoken to Sam and he did confirm it’s not theirs. I’ve since updated the article.
Thanks, so much.
A really smart and insightful glimpse of how Aussie Rules are using multi-media and social media. When your public image and team spirit is largely a function of your community of fans, social media presents a fantastic opportunity to engage them. Hopefully your analysis will inspire other teams and sports to get more involved.
Great work and thanks, Simon
Thanks Simon. I wanted an opinion from an expert in the wider social media community and really value your opinion. Cheers
Interesting article Alsop. Some good research and well thought out points.
Thorough and fascinating analysis. Good work.
A couple of thoughts:
- Clubs like Collingwood and Melbourne have to be commended for their use of twitter, not via the official feed, but via Harry O’Brien and Cameron Schwab – two of the best twitterers in the AFL. Schwab is particularly fascinating at giving an insight into his thoughts on sensitive issues, and is very responsive to fans.
- Comparing the membership base with the social media fans/followers is problematic, not just due to the above issues mentioned in the comments. If there were accurate figures for a club’s supporter base, these would be a better point of comparison, but there aren’t really (Nielson publish some every couple of years, but I have issues with the survey methodology). This is particularly evident if you contrast Sydney and North Melbourne. Sydney’s supporter base, whether passive or active, is huge due it being the only NSW, yet its membership is small. Whereas North has a very small but loyal band of supporters, with the highest membership conversion in the AFL.
Nevertheless a very instructive analysis.
Very good comments Rev, I tried to quantify my reason for highlighting the social media conversion. I agree it is a bit problematic as I am a follower of all teams but only am a fan of one. I still thought it was worthy of putting it up there because typically the best teams still stood out with good conversion rates. Dees and Magpies you’re right don’t have any dedicated social media department as such, but still get a lot done through their players and have an ability to ReTweet messages to stay active. There is a lot of info in social media that is subjective and hard to define, so I tried to quantify everything and I hope it came through. As I said, this is just my opinion and there’s no official way of grading the teams so I had to come up with my own rules.
Cheers for feedback.
Yes – your qualifications were noted. And like you say, it is an interesting graph if viewed in light of these.
Easily the best analysis I’ve come across re: AFL clubs use of social media.
It’s hard to understand how some clubs still have their heads buried in the sand (hello Western Bulldogs?!?).
From what I’ve heard from snooping it comes down to one thing with the Bulldogs, $’s. Why can’t the Cats get involved surely they have more than enough resources to get something official up.
$ is not an excuse that cuts the mustard and shows that they have NO understanding of social media. It takes one staff member 5-10 minutes a day to do this stuff FFS.
Thats where I have to disagree with you, after speaking to a few people in the know you realise just how important money is. Basically to take this stuff seriously you need a person in power driving social media, a CEO, a board, a GM whoever it may be realising social media’s positive impact and pushing it. You need money to research the industry, to pay the people to do it and then create a budget for it. Also it’s not just one staff member 5-10 minutes a day, Cricket Victoria has a team of 2, an AFL club I know has a full-time social marketer. To be good at it, it’s a full time mon-fri and MORE job. It’s no surprise that the best in the business have allocated appropriate resources in terms of dollar, HR and time to it.
Your points have some validity, and I don’t entirely disagree.
I’m basing my statement on the assumption that all clubs these days have pre-existing media departments. Whether these departments have 1, 2 or 10 staff members, I reckon one adept staff member could maintain a solid (but not necessarily ideal) social media presence with an iPhone and 5-10 minutes a day of focused social media use – it just needs to be a part of their consciousness. There within lies another presumption I suppose – that they already understand social media to some extent (which backs up your statement).
I think most club media departments focus too much of their attention on creating positive spin in mainstream media outlets. Driving their own media agenda through the very powerful tools at their disposal would have the same effect, whilst drawing new audiences into the club.
But yes – to do this, they need to invest in adept social media staff – which presumes the CEO or Board understand it’s importance and support the investment.
However, I maintain that a shortage of $ isn’t a good enough reason. It’s like suggesting that the marketing budget should be axed due to financial problems, when in fact the marketing budget may generate net revenue – it’s just that it is impossible to quantify. It’s a bit chicken and egg really.
So, to me, the shortage of $ excuse remains a cop-out to anyone who understands social media. It simply says that a club doesn’t fully understand its power, and is therefore unwilling to make the appropriate investment in it.
(And besides, if North can afford it, anyone can!)
PS – Sorry for rant.
Haha love the rant. I want more rants!
Everything I’ve learnt over the past two weeks by meeting with the clubs proves that you need a dedicated digital media manager at least, to be above competent at this job. Look at St.Kilda for example, recently their Comms guy left the club and since the date he left you can literally tell the difference. Click on the account and just by the levels of activity you can work out the date he left. The new person it seems isn’t as switched on as the former. Clubs need to be aware of it, and if they’re not they’ll suffer plain and simple. Collingwood and a few others are competent and have communications coordinators, but not such role as digital media or social media manager so theyre effectively asking the traditional media guys to do 2 jobs A) their traditional role which they went to uni for and have been trained in and B) this new social media thing, learn the in’s, out’s and how to make it successful. Do you think the clubs are willing to pay for this or give leave to the staff to do so? Doubtful
Your point about mainstream media outlets is exactly what I mean, traditional tried and true outlets are the way the clubs go, look at Cricket Victoria though they are a shining example (and I’m writing more about this) of how to do things write. Every @ tweet goes answered, competition give aways (ipods and signed bats) and huge activity at games combined with interactive videos. Tick tick tick.
Not only can North afford it, but they’re killing it and if the Saints keep dropping the ball (no pun intended) like they have this week I’ll have to knock them out of the top spot and move Kangaroos up to at least #2.
“you need a dedicated digital media manager at least, to be above competent at this job”
I say, you need someone competent. How you get them involved, and whether it’s a dedicated job is simply a HR issue (which may be best tackled the way you suggest).
All in all, I think we’re in furious agreement.