Chelsea FC upgrade Twitter account to Enhanced Brand Page
UEFA Champions League winners Chelsea are the first English Premier League to upgrade their Twitter account to an official Twitter Brand Page. The “Enhanced Brand Page for Businesses” were first rolled out in the UK around February time with Cadbury, Sky and EA Sports all early adopters.
Brands wanting an official Brand Page are required to pay $25,000 to advertise on Twitter before they can upgrade. Twitter.com say that,
“an enhanced profile page increases your brand’s Twitter presence by prominently featuring your most important content and visually branding your page.”
Most importantly, the enhanced brand page is completely public — so users can view it without joining or logging into Twitter.
The most visible feature of the enhanced brand page include an exclusive header banner – in Chelsea’s case, they have used this addition space to advertise their USA pre-season tour and the relevant hashtag #CFCTour. Other features include the ability to promote any tweet to the top of the profile page in order to keep your chosen content always in eye sight. At the minute Chelsea have promoted a YouTube video featuring a social media Q&A with a couple of Chelsea players. This is a very clever tweet to promote as on enhanced Brand pages, tweets with media (i.e. video or images) will automatically open in the timeline.
Whilst this is a significant investment on Chelsea’s behalf, it does demonstrate that clubs are finally willing to give social media the time and money it deserves in order to really engage with fans. As we’ve already stated before, Football Social Media is a very competitive and noisy arena so any edge over your competitors will prove to be invaluable.
UPDATE: I’ve been informed by Chris Nield (Manchester City Social Media Exec) that City have actually used enhanced brand pages before on Twitter in order to promote their #askVincent competition, so apologies from Digital-Football.com. As usual, Manchester City were there first and some considerable months earlier!
