Football clubs and social marketing

Being an avid football fan, I thought I would combine work and play and have a look at how football clubs fair with their social marketing. I spied a nice article by Chris Q on social media with premiership clubs – The social media Premiership – the winners and losers, which matched my own findings of which clubs are doing great and which aren’t.

His league table puts Man City at the top of the pile, even though Liverpool and Chelsea have more Facebook fans and Twitter followers, but rightly so with there with the way they engage and communicate with their fans.

Let’s have a look at the kind of things they do really well from a Twitter perspective:

Tweets per day

At the time of writing this article Man City were averaging approximately 8-9 tweets per day, but these were well spread out over the course of the day, so you’re not going to come back from your lunch to find your Twitter feed brimming with similar tweets.

Club news tweets

Yep interesting articles from their site were also tweeted so you weren’t having to check 2 sources for info. Sit back and anything decent will be delivered to your feed. No need to constantly check the website.

Personal tweets

A typical trait of a lot of social media campaigns are simply towing the corporate line and putting out the official club news. It was great to see a healthy offering of personal (yet football related) tweets.

Live match updates

If you can’t make it to the match what could be better than sitting back watching totally biased updates being sent direct to your Twitter feed.

Exclusive content or firsts

One of the great things about the Man City Twitter feed in particular was that certain teasers of information were tweeted even before appearing on the official website, making the followers feel special

Engagement with fans

With most football clubs, there is usually a clear track record of not listening to fans or taking the megaphone approach of barking out information as it suits. The Man City approach is awesome with their Facebook and Twitter feeds regularly asking questions, asking for feedback, responding to requests and retweeting good posts from their followers. Definitely a warm family feeling J

Subtle selling

The sale is always there in the background somewhere. All this investment and resource has got to bring in the cash somehow, however it’s just the odd subtle tweet here and there on a very infrequent basis.

In summary (if you’ve got this far!) in a time where clubs are ran as big business and the loyal fans are expected to turn up regardless, it’s refreshing to see a club giving back and listening to their fans and generally welcoming them into communication channels of the club.

Hats off to Man City have totally embraced the whole social media culture and there are large parts of their site dedicated to it.

Now where do I start with my own team Newcastle United…….

Check back later for who is not doing so great.