Twitter best way to communicate with Tweeple
These days, social networks, especially Twitter, are the most popular, and perhaps the best, way for football clubs and players to communicate with their supporters and vice versa. The number of footballers expressing their opinions via this 140-character
A certain player from Spanish League leaders Barcelona is even looking for someone to take care of his social media output across the main platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. The pay packet is pretty good (?35-45,000 a year).
Lewis Wiltshire, the head of sport at Twitter UK, recently said in the digitalspy website that social networking is about bringing people close to what they care about, and for many people that is football.
He said that there have been many big football moments on Twitter over the past 12 months, including Eden Hazard announcing his move to Chelsea and QPR confirming Mark Hughes’s departure and the appointment of Harry Redknapp on its Twitter feed.
“Well-respected voices like Gary Lineker have joined too, making Twitter the ideal place for fans to get closer to their teams, join in conversations, show their support, as well as hear from the experts,” he said.
According to the digitalspy website, sport is a huge driver of traffic on Twitter, with seven of the UK’s top ten most-tweeted about moments in 2012 being sport-related.
But there is some surprising information.
In the real world, English Premier League topped the world’s most watched football league but when it comes to twitter world, Spanish’s La Liga is dominating football world on Twitter.
Barcelona and Real Madrid are the top two most followed clubs and just three clubs from the English Premier League are on the top-ten list, according to a research by Unibet.
Top 10 most followed football clubs
1 @FCBarcelona 7,978,177 followers
2 @realmadrid 6,652,633 followers
3 @GalatasaraySK 2,167,388 followers
4 @Arsenal 2,126,201 followers
5 @chelseafc 1,807,313 followers
6 @Fenerbahce 1,651,073 followers
7 @LFC 1,475,911 followers
8 @SiteCorinthians (Brazil) 1,285,611 followers
9 @CR_Flamengo (Brazil) 985,064 followers
10 @Chivas (Mexico) 870,718 followers
@cristiano of Real Madrid striker Cristiano Ronaldo is the world’s most followed footballer (and indeed sportsman) with 15.6 million followers. @kaka of his fellow team-mate and Brazilian star Ricardo Kaka came second with 14.1 million followers. @WayneRooney is the UK’s most followed footballer, with more than 5.6 million followers.
Barcelona’s striker Lionel Messi became the most talked about or more than 2 million tweets about Messi were published in the last thirty days though the four-time Ballon d’Or winner has no twitter personal account. His only account is a sponsored Adidas tribute version.
Early last month, Twitter launched its Twitter League Table, ranking the 20 English Premier League clubs based on how well they engaged their supporters on the social network. Manchester City, second in the Premier League table, was named top of the Premier League table for Twitter interaction with fans.
The brand new measure system shows which clubs are using Twitter most effectively to communicate with their fans and “bring the club to life” online. It highlights some of the most dedicated fan bases and social-engaged clubs, rather than those with just the highest volumes of followers or high-profile players. Fans can help move their team up the table by following their clubs and tweeting with the relevant hashtags.
That’s the relationship of football and twitter, which appeared very close and interdependent.
