Our comms team - congrats

In my job I deal with figures a lot, so much that it sometimes spills over into my home life. Unfortunately, what follows is an example of that.

From the beginning of Feb I’ve been tracking how many followers each Championship team has on twitter and comparing growth.

Barnsley are outperforming every single one of them, we’ve grown our twitter following by 6% in 11 weeks. At first glance that might not seem like much, but when you think than the next best growth increase is Brentford with 2.86% then it becomes apparent; Reading come in with a paltry 0.37%.

So, to the Comms Team, well done on not only creating fun and engaging content but well done for increasing global awareness of little old Barnsley FC; not an easy feat.

It's easy to dismiss social media, especially if you're not keen on it, but in todays sporting world it's becoming increasingly more important for communication with fans and vital to club operations such as bringing in sponsorship money.

Full details below for nerds and weirdos.

 

Wednesday not that MASSIVE after all then.

 

It also shows the reach you can get from Premier League football.

We are historically a bigger club than Bournemouth, I’d argue similar to Watford and their followers are 3 times higher.

How have Swansea got over 1m and the same for Stoke?

The answer : Premier League football.

 

I do think Dike will have had an effect as well.

 

No doubt.

 

Whilst our content is as good as I’ve known it, I think the results on the pitch and extra attention on us because of that has certainly helped grow that particular platform. As did the additions of both Helik (we have so many Polish followers now) and Dike who have recently played for their country. So you get their national team’s account sharing lots of your content. The Dike bicycle kick was seen hundreds of thousands of times for example.

The Inbetweeners send-up when we signed Morris is still the biggest thing we’ve done in terms of engagement. My colleague played a blinder with that. But I think we are just constantly smashing out varied content at all hours, whereas lots of clubs treat it like a 9-5 job. And this isn’t just a job to us.

I’ll still reiterate that we were pulling these sorts of numbers this time last year though. Only behind Leeds at the time. It’s just more noticeable now because of the results.

When we have sponsors and logos all over our content next season, will we still get the engagement? I’m not sure. But money talks.

 

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of followers from different countries, but unfortunately there's no way of knowing that from the outside, not sure if the account owner gets to see that kind of info?

 

It's down to a bit of a perfect storm. A successful team, coupled by a signing doing well from one of the biggest countries in the world re social media, plus COVID both giving people more spare time to see/view the content, and making social media one of the only ways to now interact with the club all mixed in with some good content.

If we manage to win the play-offs, watch the numbers sky rocket, as just like the last time we graced the Premier League with our presence droves of young 'uns who have spent their lives following the successful teams would then see us as a attractive team to support(which will hopefully make them a supported for life).

 

Is this just referring to when(!) we get up to mix it with the big boys, or has a decision been made to sell advertising space on the social media content in general. If it's the second then I do worry, as when we have looked into sponsoring others social media at work(rather than just subtly gearing the content around the product), we have not had good feedback, and found numbers would drop.

 

I think regardless of divisional status, the club has to keep taking forward steps across all departments. The dream for us is to bring everything in-house. Our own website, our own video platform, better equipment and more staff. I don’t see that happening unless we ever make it to the big league where there’s more disposable cash. So that’s where you have to take advantage of all revenue streams. If by having sponsors on all of our content, we get closer to our dream, it’s a gamble we’re happy to take. Because we are confident we’d make it work.

 

We see everything. We are huge in Indonesia.

 

They were all betting on us during that unbeaten run. They thought it was guaranteed cash till Wednesday beat us, then there was dog's abuse from disgruntled gamblers.

 

Are we big in Japan?

 

are we big down under ?

 

According to one of their players in todays daily mirror they are

 

I hate folk moaning about a bet on social media. It's not as though the players are asking anyone to bet on them. Mark Williams the snooker player properly routed one " fan" who said he'd cost him money.

 

Think you've missed 3 zeros from the Wednesday figures.

 

That's interesting, thanks. Would the club be legally able to have it's own website and video platform while still a member of the EFL? I've always been under the impression that it's a group agreement that all EFL clubs use he same web provider/template etc?

 

I was just gonna post the same fella.

But I'd also mention the internationally renowned EyUp & Down for its influence in attracting our newly found foreign followers ...... or sommet like that.

 

As an aside.... the Inbetweeners was brilliant. My favourite was the team photo where Thiam was picked up and various other players doing stuff. Very clever.

Keep up the good work.