UEFA launch Twitter for Champions League and Europa League

This morning UEFA revealed two new accounts to join the Football Social Media world – @ChampionsLeague and @EuropaLeague. With the draw for the group stages happening today, it made sense that UEFA launch their new Twitter channels in order to piggyback on the media attention and social media conversation.

Whilst it has taken some time for UEFA to get their social media up and running, the governing body for European football has certainly been planning an appropriate strategy for social media before they “jump in”. In a recent interview with Mashable, David Farrelly (Head of UEFA.com) stated,

“If you sat in our editorial office and watched how we work now compared to four years ago, it’s not as much about writing news and adding photos with the user almost in a lean-back mode…Now it’s a different type of engagement where we’re using the power of the Internet to start the story on the social web.”

The United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the USA account for the top 4 providers of traffic to UEFA.com, the USA’s inclusion in there is quite surprising but a recent spike in “soccer” in mainstream US sport has certainly made the sport more popular. The MLS is now the third most attended sports league in America according to sport blog Bleacher Report. Perhaps UEFA are keen to use social media as a way of communicating with a whole new marketplace and audience in order to further generate more sponsorship and merchandise sales.

UEFA also revealed that they are working closely with Twitter to ensure that they receive the best results and this partnership includes the official Twitter Sports account (@TwitterSports) featuring a UEFA reporters tweets during the Champions League matchdays.

In it’s first 3 hours online, the @ChampionsLeague account has obtained 11.5k followers, whilst the @EuropaLeague account currently sits on 3.5k.