Scoring Under the Posts…

Club Social Media is growing from strength to strength around the province with Club Publicity Officers really seeing the value and importance of integrating social media strategy into their clubs overall marketing strategy…

Since Leinster Rugby started tracking each clubs social media page just over a year ago, club Facebook pages have grown from 60 to 66 out of the 75 clubs within Leinster having a like page.

Speaking to Elma Beirne, Domestic Marketing Executive ‘Club Facebook pages alone have grown from 50,859 likes in November 2013 to 82,695 likes just one year on. Similarly, we have seen on twitter a growth or just 2 new clubs to 68, however the engagement has grown from 52,057 to 76,034 followers in on season’.

The Marketing Executive for Leinster Rugby added ‘This is a fantastic achievement for clubs to have such a high growth percentage of social media engagement in such a short space of time. We have decided to only track Clubs with ‘like’ Facebook pages rather than those who are ‘add as friend’ as this is the preferred Facebook set up for any Club throughout the province’.

Like pages are far more beneficial to clubs than ‘add as friend’ pages as like pages allows clubs insights to their current club fan base. Insights about your followers can be found on like pages and can provide a club with information such as where they live / average age of your audience which can help the club make strategic decisions which may curb how they engage with current members and may help with decisions of how they should engage with new members/ fans of the club.

Insight allows a clubs to measure each post in terms of overall reach, likes, shares and comments. This not only can help a club in terms of the best times to post for when their members are the most engaged and active but also it can help a club gage what content works best for their club. Like pages are also more beneficial as more people tend to like ‘like pages’ as they don’t have to divulge information about themselves as they would have to on and ‘add as friend page’. Also,  clubs can promote posts and put spend behind certain campaigns using the social information that a like page provides.

Top 10 most liked clubs on Facebook

Check out Lansdowne who were previously in 17^th position in 2013 has risen to be the leading Club social media page in terms of number of likes in November 2014 with Ashbourne a close second.
 

 
Top 10 most followed clubs on twitter

Interestingly Tarf remains King of the twitter charts which is no doubt down to the clubs PRO Sam O’Byrne and his PRO team. Whilst remarkable differences are seen in the leading clubs in terms of Facebook likes, twitter differs with these top ten clubs refusing to move from their positions.
 

  
 Click here to see how all 75 Clubs in Leinster fare on Facebook and twitter.