Recent Social Media data from Digital-Football.com showed English Premier League clubs have added an additional 30 million followers on Twitter alone in the past 3 years. As clubs have managed to clearly grow their social media presence, they’ve also been able to look to monetize these channels and attract new sponsorship revenues. With just football shirt sponsorship growing by 30% across the Top 6 leagues in 2016 alone, sports clubs and their sponsors have been thrust forward and forced to work together to make the most out of the relationship.

For the sponsor, their objective is to get the most from the fees they’ve paid and ensure that their brand awareness and reputation benefit from the deal. For the sports brands, they want to ensure that they provide sponsors with everything they need but don’t jeprodise the integrity or relationship built their fans across their social networks. Getting the balance right between the two can be difficult and easy to over-complicate.

With this in mind, we’ve put together 5 very simple sponsorship activation tactics that can be employed from smaller clubs on a budget up to the global elite. If you want to explore how to implement one of these tactics, or just want a general chat please do get in touch to see how you can work with Digital-Football.com in the future.

#1 – Branded Twitter Q&A

The branded Twitter Q&A has been about for years – sponsors live tweet fans questions with a particular athlete either under a branded up hashtag or through their own brand Twitter account. The tactic relies on using an athlete who firstly warrants the attention and can draw in engagement for the sponsor, but also that the athlete understands the opportunities/pitfalls of Twitter as to avoid a PR disaster.

Typically, live Q&As last for 30 minutes to an hour and are usually moderated by a Social Media expert either from the club or the sponsor to ensure things don’t go out of hand. Sponsors tend to ask the athlete to tweet out/promote the live hashtag a few days in advance to build anticipation as well as brand awareness. Crucially, it’s important that some of the questions are actually interesting/engaging. A mix of humour, insight and a tad of personal opinion goes a long way.

#2 – Video Content

Becoming every popular but perhaps more difficult to execute is a sponsored video campaign. The continuing trend, and one we highlighted nearly 4 years ago, is to provide behind-the-scenes content with staff and athletes. Some clubs/sponsors choose to take the Q&A further by making is a Skype session, others have worked with clubs to go behind the scenes at the training ground in order to offer fans an insight into what makes their club work. Increasingly though, sponsors are desperately trying to inject humor into the videos and often engage players in some form of challenge.

Such challenges can be as simple as a crossbar challenge or a keepie up challenge. More creative clubs have leveraged the sponsors country of origin and tried to get the players to participate in some activity that has cultural significance e.g. attempting to kick an NFL football. Video can be tricky as it does require athlete access during busy periods and relies on the athletes actually being open and up for having some fun, which depending on the current performance may be harder to generate.

#3 – Creative Content with a simple “Sponsored by”

This year football has seen some wonderful creative content pieces produced by football club art teams – there’s numerous great programmes out there that have changed their artwork from the usual drab “us vs. them” footy programme to following themes more akin to a comic book. Sponsors and clubs should be jumping on the back of this and looking at ways they can do more with their creative.

As an example, any football programme enthusiast will know, there are some seriously great vintage designs from the 50s and 60s out there. Clubs are already redesigning their traditional matchday programmes to give them a vintage twist. Sponsors should be working with clubs to reproduce / mock-up glorious famous matches or try hype up upcoming derby games by going back to their routes with vintage programmes.

#4 – Social Media isn’t just online – bring your online fans offline

American sports, as ever, nail the concept of taking a social media audience online and bringing them into the real offline world of a football stadium. Clubs and sponsors need to be doing more with their brand influencers across Social and hosting offline events that allows these precious brand ambassadors more access than ever before. Whether that’s a “blogger training session” with the gaffer or inclusion in the press pit for core fan led blogsites.

Marriot recently announced a competition allowing superfans to sleepover in the stadium ahead of the next Super Bowl so they can be their first to take in the atmosphere. This isn’t anything new in the NFL in fact, as it’s been going on for nearly 6 years – in most cases with a charitable angle to help kids without beds sleepover in the same stadium their heroes perform in week in / week out.

#5 – Sponsored App Development

Unbelievably many sports brands are still struggling to get a half decent app developed that actually has a purpose. A purposeful and well built app costs money, and whilst sports like football are multi-billion pound industries, marketing budgets are often tight. Therefore, there’s a fantastic opportunity for sponsors to stump up the cash to develop the club app in partnership with the club.

This might mean sacrificing an area of the map to some branded/sponsored content somewhere, but it will also allow the club to create a new potential revenue stream and partnership with their sponsors and fans. Whether thats the design and build of an informational live match day app or perhaps just a branded game, there’s a great opportunity for both sites to collect audience data and help each another out

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Since we first started reporting on football social media in 2010, we’ve seen football clubs progress rapidly with the times. In 2010 clubs were broadcasting RSS feeds on their Twitter feeds and were hiding their video content behind paywalls. In 2014, creative content is here to stay as clubs look to finally harness data with match infographics, leverage new social channels and work harder to entertain their fans. However, football is increasingly financially focussed and all this good work will be in vain if football clubs fail to properly demonstrate how they are making a return.

For many football directors and financial backers, they’ve invested (albeit with small budgets) in social media to answer the pleas of club PR, Press and Marketing managers. Now, with some 18 months of investment and more and more clubs employing ‘Social Media Manager’ roles, 2014 will undoubtedly be a year to reflect back on these decision and assess the value of social media.

Undoubtedly, social media is a requirement for any sports team – the benefits and cross-department value for customer service, marketing, press and fan-club relationship management are indisputable. Unfortunately, finances are often the primary concern for the board of directors and they will constantly be looking at areas of the business leaking cash and other areas where it’s providing an alternate revenue stream.

For many clubs this will mean looking back at their campaigns and strategy and analysing metrics such as traffic generated to website, assisted conversions, resource spent and KPI targets met. There’s no question that club content has got better, but what return has it given the club? The football industry needs to now move much further than just Likes and Tweets. These metrics certainly helped early on and are still relevant for understanding the reach and audience, but they cannot and should not be the only source for measuring ROI.

Instead, clubs should now be thinking about the next stage of their social media and look to evolve their social media strategy.

Better Measurement

As previously stated, the usual social metrics are still valuable but by themselves, they are meaningless to a financial director who has the power to invest or no invest in future social media strategies. Football clubs need to make better use of tools such as Google Analytics to actually understand not just what traffic their social media content is generating, but what actual money social media brings. Clubs need to be demonstrating how social media updates and content are selling merchandise, match tickets and hospitality packages.

Better Tracking

The above can only be achieved through a more robust social media tracking strategy. The majority of football clubs fail to use Google Campaign tagging to track their social media audience in Analytics. Spending that extra time to tag every tweet and Facebook update may be a little laborious, but the advantage of this is that clubs can see exactly how many conversions their campaign had, this means they can show, “we spent 20 hours on this project at a cost of £xxx – but we generated three times that amount in sold match tickets directly from social media”. This is the data directors want to hear and social media managers need to deliver in order to justify continuing/more budget.

Develop the strategy

Most clubs know their audience and know how to best engage with them, the time to begin marketing better is now. Previously clubs jumped into marketing mode straight away without doing any of the community development. They addressed this issue but somewhere along the way have forgotten that they need to show real ROI other than tweets and Likes. Whether fans like it or not, clubs need to look at tweaking their strategy to ensure that there’s a level of monetization involved. Social media managers need to work closer with commercial teams and provide input on how the traditional offline kit launch campaign can be integrated into social media.

Leverage sponsorship

Clubs need to address sponsorship immediately. Sponsors are starting to get very savvy to the fact that they should and can leverage the club and player social media presence for their own ends, but few clubs look to their sponsors to do the same. Clubs need to ensure they have complete control over their social media properties and know what they are legally allowed to do on social media in order to avoid breaking any advertising standards. 2014 will see more sponsors asking clubs to work in social media clauses such as “we want the club account to tweet the sponsor account on every match day”. Clubs should in turn look to sponsors to help fund larger content pieces that they might not necessarily get budget from the club for.

Clubs must start to think more financially about their social strategy otherwise they run the risk of losing further budget. The best social media strategies (and professionals) are those who set realistic expectations, understand their audience and can then devise appropriate strategies with the resources at their disposal. If clubs can show their board of directors that they are making money from the platforms, whilst continuing to engage with fans – then they will be in the perfect position to execute larger and more creative strategies in the future. 2014, particularly the end of this season may be make or break for many football clubs social media strategies.

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One of the biggest challenges many football clubs face is how can the limit the occurrences of such instances and how do they do this with players from academy level up to the first team. Furthermore, the challenge is made harder by the fact that players regularly come and go, meaning that clubs need to ensure that whatever tactics they do, that it happens constantly.

With this in mind, we look at the options open to football clubs in dealing with the issue of problematic players on Social Media:

1. Ban Social Media

Perhaps not as popular as it was several years ago, banning Social Media is undoubtedly the boldest of options available to clubs and usually stems from the manager’s reluctance to understand the value in Social.

Whilst simply banning players from Social Media sounds like a logical solution for stopping players saying stupid tweets (or anything at all), it’s turned out to be unenforceable and present the club in bad light with their fans. The temptation to ban Social Media might solve the problem in the short term but it never works in the long.

2. Create a deterrent

Fining players, or even dropping them from footballing duties, due to bad Social Media practice can act as a good deterrent for players, particularly if the deterrent is strong enough. A strong deterrent might deter players from leaking information or making stupid comments.

However, with the wages so high in football and many players making their controversies post-match or in an emotional state, sometimes this minute lapse in thought is enough to cause the crisis.

3. Provide Social Media guidelines

Social Media guidelines are generally the starting point for most Social Media training campaigns. A good Social Media guideline document provides players with a point of reference for the rules as well as something to help educate players on what’s expected of them.

Guidelines must be engaging, to the point and easy to digest however, as many simply produce several pages of A4 black and white paper that is likely to be shoved into a drawer and never read.

4. Educate with experience

Many clubs have began inviting Social Media training experts into the club to help run sessions with the players where the best and worst scenerios/case studies can be clearly demonstrated and explained. The very best sessions are ones that don’t preach to players but directly engage them.

Pulling out real examples from the squad is a fantastic way of creating an atmosphere where players can enjoy a bit of banter but also see the effects of their tweets for themselves

5. Realtime monitoring

A very recent development to Social Media protection for football clubs is a new piece of technology called Social Pundit. The platform allows clubs to monitor players tweets (From academy to senior squad) 24/7 against a database of “trigger words”.

Should a player tweet something that is in the database, it will ping an email alert to the club and record the tweet (regardless if the player quickly deletes it or not). This system helps clubs identify problem players as well as act as a good deterrent to players on Twitter.

6. Trial and test players

An excellent initiative created and used at Birmingham City FC is the use of mock press conferences and integrating real Social Media content from a players own Social Media to test their reactions and make them aware of how it can be used against them.

Birmingham City cleverly use a players own Tweets (usually the ones of a controversial nature) against him/her to illustrate just how easy it is for something as innocent as a tweet to quickly put the player in a difficult spot.

7. Focus on the positives

Ultimately one of the best tactics a club can undertake is not just focusing on the negatives but encouraging players to use Social Media in a positive manner. Many clubs have success with players by showing them how a good Social Media presence can help them commercially in life after football.

By encouraging footballers to build a strong, honest and engaged Social Media community – clubs hope to avoid mishaps as well as leverage the players own audience for the brand.

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It’s incredibly easy for us and other blogs to make suggestions, demand more from clubs and try demonstrate how other sports and clubs are using clever tactics to nurture engagement. However, sometimes there can be a number of factors stopping these concepts ever coming to fruition. With this in mind, here’s a look at some of the most common elements slowing down the adoption of some really awesome Football Social Media:

1. Social Media Scepticism

Arguably Football Social Media has suffered in the past 3 years from the problem of scepticism. The industry itself has massively changed and where traditional offline marketing has been an effective strategy (And still is), digital has taken more and more prominence. The closed off nature of some of the footballing industry has perhaps led to a reluctance to let go of some dated habits and created a natural scepticism to anything new or different. This hasn’t been a problem to just the football industry but all industries looking to figure out Social Media.

2. Coaching staff buy-in

Whilst the media or marketing department might absolutely love the idea of YouTube videos from the training ground and behind-the-scenes footage, this is incredibly intrusive to a veteran coach who cares only about protecting players, tactics and techniques from the outside world.

It’s fair to say meeting marketing KPI’s isn’t on many coaches or managers priority list, so we wouldn’t be surprised if many ideas such as the above were rejected from the team management themselves.

3. Resource and Time

There seems to be a misconception that because footballers are transferred for millions that this kind of financial policy translates throughout the club – far from it. Most clubs tend to be very well run with strict financial spending for things like marketing, data capture and fan engagement. Whilst much of the top teams in the Premiership have 3 or 4 Social Media stakeholders to help out (or an external agency), nearly everyone else has perhaps 1 or 2 individuals tasked with “looking after the Twitter account” and all the pains that can go with it. Clubs simply sometimes don’t have the man power.

4. Licencing Restrictions

Sponsors and partnerships dominate the football industry, they provide clubs with so much money that it isn’t a surprise that in exchange for this clubs often abide by very strict licencing and brand restrictions.

Football clubs were long forbidden from even having a YouTube channel after the Premier League had a slight dispute with Google, and with TV broadcasters wanting exclusive rights on match footage is it a surprise that it can be difficult to get things like match highlights, goals or full games free of charge on YouTube?

5. Knowledge Gap

Through no fault of the staff in the football industry, they’ve had Social Media thrust upon them by the fans in a relatively short period of time. For many of the most experienced football industry bods, Social Media can be something of a black hole that doesn’t necessarily make it clear where the return on investment is in hard cold cash (which, in the football industry is all that matters on many occasions). Sometimes clubs simply don’t have the internal skills or knowledge what to do. Undoubtedly in the past 18 months clubs have massively improved and have either outsourced the work or looked to bring the talent and ability into their organisations.

So there you have it – these are our top 5 reasons clubs might be struggling to get all those creative ideas delivered to their fans. Sometimes, we need to take a step back and realise that there’s a lot of pieces moving on the board and lots of other elements to consider before we lambast a club for not trying.

Any suggestions? Leave a comment below and I’ll continue to update the article.

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With the foundations of Football Social Media already set, what does 2013 mean for the 1,551 football clubs currently using Twitter and even more on Facebook?

1. Blogger Outreach

As the power of influence continues to shift towards the blogger-sphere from the traditional press (And note, I’m not saying bloggers have more influencer, just more than they used to!) – clubs must start to take notice of the opportunity that influential fan bloggers hold. Football clubs will begin to develop deeper relationships with bloggers as a way of changing fan perceptions, improving fan engagements and help generate Social Media noise. This will come in the form of blogger match invites, bloggers at press conferences and providing bloggers with behind the scenes content. Fans will always trust their fellow fans over club communications (Which are often perceived to have a commercial agenda).

2. Curated Tweets for media publications

Fan tweets are increasingly becoming the go-to device for measuring fan opinions. Very slowly, we’ve seen fan and player tweets appear in sports TV shows and print media as a way of representing the thoughts of a fanbase on a particular issue or incident. If clubs are savvy enough, they will look to promote their own Social Media and brand by encouraging fans to tweet more often. Clubs can do this by curating the best and most influential tweets from fans and players into their offline and online media. Whether this via projecting tweets throughout stadium concourses as Manchester City have done or including them in website match reports – it’s a great way of involving fans with content production.

3. More use of “Datatainment” in club media

No longer a new concept, the aptly named “Datatainment” ideology is the process of using big data as a way to entertain and engage with fans. A fantastic example of this has been Arsenal’s Stats Zone content on their website before playing opposition.

The London giants use performance data such as pass completion, goals scored, clean sheets, team form etc. as a way to predict the outcome of the match and help entertain fans by giving them some insight before the game. This has to be adopted by more clubs as data – or stats – fits the psyche of a football fan perfectly. Datatainment content is a great way for clubs to build excitement around football matches, help bust myths about player performances and generate substantial levels of Social Media noise with engaging and visual content.

4. Bigger fines, harsher punishments for player Twitter mischief

In 2012 we finally saw footballing bodies like the FA and the Premier League issue Social Media guidelines for football players in the UK. We’ve also learnt that many clubs are internally training and educating players around good and bad practice as players have become more active on Social Media channels like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Still in it’s early stages, we can expect clubs to develop these pieces of governance and regulation further – so expect to see tougher and harsher punishments for football players making mistakes on Twitter in the future. Club Brand and PR can take huge hits in the mainstream press from negative tweets – so ensuring players don’t portray the club in a bad light will be a priority for every Social Media manager at football clubs this year.

5. Monetization of Social Media channels

Last but certainly not least, finding a way to make money from Social Media will be perhaps the most important issues football clubs face in 2013. If 2012, was the year clubs got to grip using Social Media and showing how influential it is, 2013 will be the year clubs will have to prove it’s worth the investment to their board of directors. Expect football clubs to be inventive in ways of trying to monetize their Social Media – this might be through making more content to sell match day tickets, more tie-ins with partner sponsors and better use of Social Media to help aid merchandise sales.

So there you have it – our official predictions for 2013. After getting a decent number of our Football Social Media predictions right for 2012, hopefully we can continue our good track record and continue to bring you the most exclusive and very latest news about how football clubs are using Social Media.

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It may feel a bit strange to see the number of Facebook followers of FC Barcelona (38M) is lower than Messi’s (40M). The same happens with Real Madrid‘s number of Facebook fans (34M) comparing with Cristiano Ronaldo (52M). Personal brands have been understood as fundamental weapons to leverage a club’s brand. This has been particularly agreed and adopted since the year 2000, when Florentino Perez won Real Madrid’s presidency for the first time with the promise of creating a team of “Galacticos”.

At a first sight, it may well look like the individual player is greater than the club but, in what comes to sports marketing and social media, it may very well be this way.

Many world-wide fans follow and support their clubs in their own national leagues, complementing it with the tendency of following one or two world-class players of their liking. One needs only look to Asia (the commercial and marketing success of Park Ji-Sung in the UK or Nakata in Italy have become classic case-studies in sports marketing Universities) and look at how European players are being keenly followed away from home – David Beckham or Robbie Keane being a good example for LA Galaxy.

In Portugal, it has been curious to observe the market’s preferences in the past decade: TV shares of Manchester United and Chelsea were incredibly high when Ronaldo and Mourinho were starring in the Premier League. Now, Real Madrid seem to be every Portuguese fan’s second club: after Benfica, FC Porto and Sporting Lisbon, Real Madrid’s matches have the biggest TV-shares. Why? Because they have Portuguese personal stars: Mourinho and Ronaldo.

Top European clubs have understood this tendency and take advantage of the online world, namely social media sites, to promote their stars and help develop their own communication channels. Indeed, these channels will lead to more awareness and engagement, both with the players and the club.

It basically means what firms and advertisers are looking forward to hear: “more audience”. More audience will eventually be reflected on the club’s direct sales – shirts, merchandise – and indirect sales such as new sponsorship agreements and TV broadcasting rights.

It’s a win-win situation that definitely proves one thing: social media is continuously changing the game.

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Furthermore, it’s clear that clubs have come a long way in recent months to improve fan engagement by using their Social Media channels to better use. However, how do they fare in comparison to some of our expectations?

SOCIAL TV & SPORTS

“Fans always have something to say and increasingly they are doing so simultaneously during sporting events.”

Social TV was dubbed the hottest thing to happen in 2012 having been constantly talked about throughout 2011. We initially predicted that sports broadcasters might start to use Tweets and incorporate them into their programming. However, this has yet to shown itself and although some programmes like Match of the Day are now on Twitter – and talking about Tweets on their programme – none are fully integrating a live Twitter stream onto their TV.

SOCIAL MEDIA POLICIES FOR ATHLETES

“I predict clubs will either produce their own, or get social consultants in to do the job for them.”

Footballers causing controversy on Twitter was a popular talking point in 2011 and very much continued into 2012, so it’s no surprise that we predicted clubs would get more active in helping players better understand Social Media. As such, we were right on this one and have seen the likes of the FA and the Premier League issuing official guidelines to players. We’ve also heard many reports of clubs holding training sessions specifically for Social Media.

SMALLER TEAMS START TO ADOPT SOCIAL MEDIA

“I think the major football clubs in particular will begin to see commercial success from their channels and smaller clubs will take notice and tentatively start building Facebook and Twitter communities.”

This was always likely to happen so it’s no surprise we got this one right. Major clubs continue to dominate the Social Media landscape but their success has been seen by smaller teams who have taken to Twitter and Facebook. Smaller clubs have done less grander campaigns with smaller budgets, however it’s great to see teams using Social Media as a way to engage with fans and try generate better attendances.

STADIUMS WILL GO ‘SOCIAL-READY’

“I think as clubs and stadiums realise that social AND mobile is increasingly becoming a huge matchday experience for their customers, they will start to look at developing better 3G signals, better Wi-Fi access and maybe, just hopefully, social media based centres for fans.”

Even though clubs didn’t particularly take to Foursquare as we predicted, we’ve certainly seen signs of clubs trying to make their stadiums more connected to Social Media. The ‘Connected Stadium’ has already come to major sides like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester City – with many other top tier sides planning some form of connectivity improvements in the next 12 months.

CLUBS WILL CROWD-SOURCE MERCHANDISE

“Clubs will start to get fans involved in the design and judging of club merchandise – particularly the kit design.”

Having seen Marseille generate so much engagement and commercial success for their Facebook designed away shirt, I was certain more clubs would be more creative with their merchandise. Unfortunately, many clubs are still unable and unreceptive to letting their fans have input around shirt designs using Social Media.

M-TICKET

“The m-Ticket, or the mobile ticket, will become more popular and prevalent in club marketing strategies.”

With customers becoming more digitally savvy and paper slowly being phased out for items like tickets – it’s no surprise to see technology like M-Tickets appear more and more in the entertainment industry. In 2012 we saw a multitude of clubs use M-Tickets to try make it much easier to get fans to matches. However, despite the growth of smartphones – we’ve seen very little development on a large scale for club apps.

MANAGERS JOIN TWITTER TO BYPASS THE PRESS

“It cannot be too long before managers start to use Twitter in order to get their thoughts across to the fans without having to deal with press.”

We had hoped that Football Social Media’s growth would also see more managers take to Facebook and Twitter as a way of engaging with their fans. However, this has perhaps gone the opposite direction with many managers slamming the channels and refusing to see the potential benefits. Just major manager uses social in the United Kingdom – Celtic’s Neil Lennon has both Twitter and Facebook on a regular basis.

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So with 4 out of 7 right, most of these predictions have come true. Yet, there’s still room for improvement and clubs can always be doing a lot more to engage with their fans. Coming later this week we will put forward our 2013 predictions – so keep an eye out.

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The four time UEFA Champions League winners demonstrated that good Social Media isn’t always necessarily always about the way you to present yourself, but often how to engage with others. In this case, FC Barcelona showed what can only be described as enormous class, friendship and grace towards Celtic FC.

Celtic FC had celebrated the anniversary of 125 unbroken years in football the day before, so it was no surprise that the club had put together some excellent content to stir up excitement and look back on their history. However, what was a surprise was how Barca were so involved and complementary to the Scottish side in celebrating their birthday with them.

In a sport where gentlemanly behavior, grace and respect are so often ignored in favour for aggressiveness, rivalry and dog-eat-dog mentalities, Barcelona’s pre and post match activity was nothing but startling.

Barcelona officials were in attendance at Celtic’s 125th year comemrative event and posted kind birthday comments on their sites pre-match. Barca Vice-President Carles Villarrubi hosted a Catalan cultural event at the University of Glasgow. And Celtic and Barcelona legend Henrik Larsson was drafted into the the official FC Barcelona website to comment about the two teams and the shared philosophy and cultural identity that both clubs share.

Post-match, the official FC Barcelona showed a huge amount of class by tweeting the following message of congratulations (have we ever seen anything like this before from an opposition team in such an important competition?):

Even the Barcelona players showed great grace and class, with the likes of Gerard Pique tweeting congratulations to Celtic and commenting on the famous Parkhead Champions League atmosphere.

So, why is this so good. It’s no secret of course which team I support and why I’d be writing this, but in honesty, I was incredibly surprised to see that some clubs still understand the way the game should be played and even in defeat remain gracious. Furthermore, it was very clear that Barcelona were keen to position their brand as very much a “family club” with good sporting values. Inevitably, they will have picked up a few more Glaswegian supporters – which might not mean too much, but when you consider that maybe a couple thousand new fans might head to the Nou Camp for the tour or the game, buy a shirt or even promote Barcelona content – this may be worth it.

FC Barcelona’s brand is one that is the epitome of everything that is right in football – the way they play, the way the club is run, the fans and even their social media. They could’ve taken a very different direction with their content, but they didn’t – and for that I applaud them for incredibly classy social media.

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For football clubs, they need to shake off the dust and let go of their traditional marketing plans – sales promotions, “On this day” historical updates and nonsensical marketing videos. Instead, clubs should be monitoring and listening to their fans – old and new.

Last year, nearly 1 million people came to the UK to watch football, contributing a colossal £706 million to the tourism industry. This is a massive stat and clubs should focus on how they can turn football stadiums into tourism landmarks and amphitheaters for entertainment.

With this in mind, Football Social Media activity needs to become more about how to entertain fans rather just inform or marketing. Social Media needs to create excitement pre-match, drive ticket sales and tap into the passion of the fans.

How do you entertain your fans?

Clubs need to think about what fans want – this means behind the scenes footage, insights that have previously been concealed around diet, using data to entertain e.g. datatainment, training, even what actually happens on transfer deadline day.

Prior to matches, clubs need to show the most exciting encounters with the opposition – they need to show that this isn’t just another league game but it’s a grudge match for last seasons thrashing, the return of a previous player now playing for the opposition or a chance to take on the toughest team in the league. Clubs need to use YouTube to show snippets of highlights from past games, use data to predict scores or talk about key players and unite the fans behind emotive team support hashtags on Twitter.

Football is a very tribal sport – where traditions, pride and loyalty feature as a huge ingredient of what makes a fan a “true fan”. Clubs need to play upon this and create a siege mentality in the club using Social Media, they need to hype up games and players but at the same time ensure it doesn’t go so over the top that it comes across as cheesy. Anyone who watches football on TV will know that the 30 second trailer ahead of a game on Sky Sports can really get the blood going, this is the type of content and effect that clubs should be looking to replicate.

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Real chairman tweet

Last year, QPR Chairman Tony Fernandes’ use of the network to ask suggestions for new signings for the squad was certainly innovative and proved if used well, Social Media is a valid and capable utility for engaging fans with the club. It’s particularly important as questions arise over some clubs lack of interactivity with fans via these networks.

Admittedly, questions like that will place strain on the chairman’s relationship with the manager who may feel undermined (and in fact, former manager Neil Warnock later claimed he felt that Twitter had poisoned Fernandes against him), however, if managed well and used by asking sensible productive questions, there are opportunities to benefit from the likes of Twitter and help create a two-way relationship between club and fan. In the past, much research has shown that clubs are content to ignore fans via social media, however, Fernandes has shown there is an opportunity to narrow the gap between the two.

However, as like any stakeholder in the game, Social Media can bring more trouble than its worth.

West Ham United Chairmen David Gold recently lashed out at Alan Hansen who he claims said ‘real chairmen shouldn’t have a football opinion’ and that ‘a good chair is a chair that doesn’t sign autographs or interact with fans’ via his Twitter account.

Chairmen on Twitter

• – Tony Fernandes (QPR) – 74
• – David Gold (West Ham) – 69
• – Darragh MacAnthony (Peterborough) – 63

It is important for chair persons to be seen engaging with fans and asking for feedback and social media presents them with that opportunity. In the larger picture of the club, players uses of Twitter can be good but is really too restrictive to have any real benefit for the club, whilst Chairman have the power to seek productive feedback via social media channels.Whilst I don’t agree with everything David Gold has said in the past, I have to agree that his use of Twitter is productive and engaging. He reads tweets, retweets and replies to fans questions and is the type of chairmen fans want to interact with.

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