Manchester City has achieved a Premier League “first” by launching a new app for Amazon Fire TV that will showcase the acclaimed CityTV video series. Other content that will be available includes: a behind-the-scenes look at the tunnel on match day, team manager Pep Guardiola training tips, player profile segments and the club’s 10-part series called Global City.

Club officials felt their fan base viewing habits have changed over time, as more of them are using online streaming services for their broadcasting needs. Man City believes that Amazon Fire TV is a growing media platform with huge potential, and felt it was important that CityTV be apart of this growing trend. A move of this nature is a clear sign of how trouble the waters are for cable television providers because their former viewers now exist on multiple digital platforms.

Manchester City is Sport’s Leading Technological Innovator

This announcement is just the latest of a long line of technological advancements offered by Manchester City, who have become an innovator in the professional sports business world. They recently launched “Instant Articles,” which provides the fans with the latest club news on their Facebook page. Plus, Man City will send iPhone users an official exclusive club sticker set via a text message.

Marketing on various social media outlets allows the club to better align itself with a wider global audience. The hope is to strengthen the demand and distribution of Man City’s video content on a broader, more popular digital television platform. Last season, Manchester City’s YouTube channel was the second most popular professional football club website in the world. The club’s videos averaged 150 views-per-minute during the regular season.

Prior to the 2015 campaign, Man City became the first Premier League club to offer a “second screen” video app to their fans sitting inside the Etihad Stadium seats. The CityMatchDay app offers a live video stream of the match and real-time stats to the paying customers and Man City fans around the globe on various social media outlets.

Inside the stadium, fans are able to connect on a free-WiFi network to watch live alternate camera angles from the match that isn’t available to the viewers at home. Plus, you have instant access to a multi-camera setup that provides a bird’s-eye view of the pitch. Many of the fans enjoy the reverse angle replays of the match’s most controversial plays, which offers a different view to argue with other patrons. The video stream can be rewound up to 30 seconds, as this allows the fans another opportunity to re-watch those breathtaking goals after they actually took place.

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“Mido – The only box you will find him in these days is a KFC box. He retired aged 30 last year.”

Mido, who has long been the target if fans for his weight, clearly must’ve been searching for himself (as the tweet hadn’t been directed to his main Twitter handle) and took great offence to the tweet by responding with the excessive reply,

“@FadedFootballers my friend the amount of money that I have made from football is good enough to fuck your mum 20 years for free”

The bizarre (and poorly constructed) insult was quickly deleted by the player but not quick enough for someone on Reddit.com to take a screenshot. Mido, who retired last season after one substitute appearance with Barnsley, is just another player to add to the list of athletes giving in to provocations from fans and responding unnecessarily.

Abuse from fans – in the stands, on the radio, in the street and increasingly online – has always been part and parcel of the footballing life. Players, despite often being on the receiving end of awful abuse, have to remain professional and as calm as possible in order to avoid bringing upon themselves negative press coverage.

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Whilst a simple and fairly basic tactic, it’s one rarely seen in football stadiums are clubs struggle to properly integrate their online activity into the football stadium. We’ve long been advocates of the “Connected Stadium” model that advocates using technology to not only encourage social media engagement within the stadium, but also pulling in the external fanbase who follow the match via social media into the matchday experience.

Obviously there’s the usual challenges of ensuring the right technology is used by the club as well as making sure that content is properly moderated, but this is fantastic to see arguably a lower profile club (Albeit Southampton have been excellent in the Premier League this season) not scared to invest in the strategy.

The benefit of this is undoubtedly that it should encourage fans at the stadium to tweet the official accounts, thereby improving engagement and potentially giving the club some further data capture. Secondly, the initiative also shows the club being innovative with technology and undoubtedly fits with the clubs ambitions to position the brand as a serious top tier Premier League team. Thirdly, this again an excellent idea for engaging with fans and giving them  real reason to engage with the clubs social media presence.

Earlier in the season, Queens Park Rangers announced they would be advertising match specific hashtags on the home dugout in a bid to encourage fans to use Twitter to share their thoughts and photos about the game.

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Michael Chopra tweeted,

“Fucking joke this come in training only 6 fucking players here then find out the fitness coach taken the football session #joke.”

The tweet was later on deleted by Chopra and the club announced that the tweet was in relation to the fact “Chopra was one of number of players asked to report to training as normal this morning for extra work with the fitness coach.”  Chopra has been fined the maximum amount for breaching the clubs code of conduct and given a very public warning from the staff at Blackpool FC.

The Seasiders issued the following statement on their website around midday that stated:

“The manager has requested that the fine levied against Chopra, which equates to more than £10,000, be donated to the club’s Community Trust, to assist in their work as part of Altogether Now – A Legacy for Blackpool. The club can confirm that Chopra was one of number of players asked to report to training as normal this morning for extra work with the fitness coach.

Both the manager and the chairman are aware and disappointed with the contents of his tweet, prompting this course of action.

The player, who has the right to appeal, has since apologised for the tweet and removed the contents from his account. The money will be utilised across a number of projects to improve the lives of young people in Blackpool, through the delivery of health, education and inclusion schemes.”

Whilst the action itself is to be frowned upon, Blackpool must be commended for their quick turn around on not only identifying the tweet but preparing a statement and the necessary punishment. In less than 3 hours, the Championship side managed to react and readdress the situation.

Blackpool could’ve improved their image further by perhaps suggesting the player would now have to undergo a Social Media best practice session and be refreshed about the club’s own Social Media Policy (which we can assume the club has).

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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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Obviously, this isn’t a perfect engagement calculation but it does offer us a quick insight into the value of followers and activity.

The table did show some surprising results, one being that Liverpool had only an engagement rate of 18.8% despite having a sizable following. Arguably one of the best results went to Arsenal who command a mammoth 3.1 million Twitter followers and still managed to hold a respectable 44.6% engagement rate in November. Our quick engagement figure may not be perfect, but it does quickly allow us to see how effective clubs are being with their content coupled with how often fans engage with the official Twitter properties.

Twitter Engagement Table (November 2013)

As football clubs invest more heavily in Social Media, now that they are seeing more demand, we can expect to see more metrics like this becoming more important and common online. Judging growth solely on follower statistics is slowly losing relevance, where engagement is growing in importance. With clubs looking to monetize their Social Media presence to potential sponsors, metrics like this can help place a value on the club’s Social Media, as well as help create internal benchmarks to measure against.

Furthermore, such engagement metrics can add value for projecting not just future Social Media engagement, but aligning with marketing campaigns such as season ticket strategies. These figures can be used and installed into the marketing funnel to help project how much traffic Social Media can generate for the club website, and in turn – conversions.

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The draw was fuelled by tweets from high profile footballers including Vincent Kompany, Sergio Aguero, Gary Lineker and Mesut Özil – which demonstrates that Twitter’s celebrity strategy still has as much importance as it did when the platform first launched. Sports fans – football fans in particular – continue to voice their opinions on the social network, but they also use Twitter due to the access to opinions of players and pundits alike.

Last month, we announced that Premier League clubs alone had some 100,000,000 million Facebook Likes combined. This is the latest statistic to prove that sports teams, celebrities and fans are an incredibly important ingredient to Twitter’s success.

However, with some 1.7m tweets being generated around the subject, where does that leave television? The BBC’s coverage of the draw did include a very brief social media roundup of several players and some statistics around the most mentioned tweets (which is an excellent development in their programming), but with so much data available, do sports broadcasters need to work harder to incorporate this into their schedule?

Should TV broadcasters incorporate more social media into their shows? And what technology/content should they use in order to do this?

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In less than 3 months, Premier League clubs have grown by 10 million which is staggering growth considering that’s the equivalent of the population of Greece suddenly signing up to Facebook and Liking an EPL side.

Facebook has quickly become a part of everyday football life and a trusted source for team line-up announcements, transfer confirmations and match day information. The sheer growth of the platform worldwide, but particularly in football, has also changed the way that the way the mainstream media has control over football news.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter have given clubs an incredible advantage over the traditional media industry in that no longer are they subject to the opinions and spin of journalists, but they have a clear and transparent platform to say what they want without interference. However, it’s important to note that this does work both ways – with fans often resorting to Facebook for complaints about poor team performance, lack of transfer activity and the leadership of a club.

Whilst Manchester United are still relatively new to Twitter, they’ve been an active user on Facebook over the past few years and with 36.7 million fans, they are the largest contributor to the leagues combined total. Interestingly, a quick look at the United Facebook Page shows that the majority of their postings are exclusively images – a strategy that the club have been keen to use on Google+ and Twitter.

With 100,000,000 Likes – it is indisputable that the value social media holds in the football industry is massive. Clubs that fail to properly think, equip and invest are not only missing a commercial opportunity, but they are far behind what the modern fan expects.

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The R’s have used dedicated matchday hashtags since the start of last season and have found the move popular in engaging with the QPR fans pre, during and post-match. Adam Hulme, QPR’s Multi-Media Officer, said,

“We are always looking for new and innovate ways to engage with our fans through social media. We understand that communication with our fans is crucial and our social media channels allow us to experiment with new technologies to help engage with our fans.

In becoming the first club to add our matchday hashtag to our home dugout we hope to show our growing fanbase how to interact with each other to hopefully add an extra dimension to their matchday experience.”

This is a fantastic initiative by the club and meets one of our early predictions that we should expect to see Social Media having more of an impact not just online but also offline. Back in May, Digital-Football commented that we expected to see more football clubs improve WiFi connectivity in the stadium, as well as have more awareness for Social Media channels around the concourse and pitch itself.

Alex Trickett, Head of Sport at Twitter UK, said,

“Twitter brings people closer to the things they care about and for many in the UK, that means football. “We are excited to see QPR thinking of new ways to use our platform to connect fans with the team and players.”

Last season, QPR were the first Premier League side to stream live pre-match press conferences through the social media channel Ustream.

QPR have long been at the front line of Football Social Media – offering fan engagement across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook – as well as relatively new platforms such as Ustream, Instagram and Vine. Earlier this season, QPR used Vine to announce their first opponents of the 2013/14 Championship campaign – yet another innovative way of breaking news first. In August, the R’s were named as the most socially savvy football team in the UK outside of the Premier League and scooped the ‘Innovation in Insight-Driven Multichannel Marketing’ award for the #ForeverRs campaign.

We look forward to this development and it will be interesting to follow how much of effect it has on matchday engagement for the London Championship side. Certainley, it’s positive to see a club in a lower league (although undoubtedly the recently relegated club is of Premier League calibre) be brave to test boundaries and take risks in new marketing strategies.

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Hoops fans have been asked to tweet in their questions to the manager on the #AskHarry hashtag and throughout today, he will respond via the @OfficialQPR Twitter account. Whilst Twitter Q&As are incredibly common among clubs, it’s good to see a club willing to integrate their manager into their activity. Managers on Twitter are incredibly rare, and to the best of our knowledge the only major football manager currently using Twitter is Celtic’s Neil Lennon.

Undoubtedly, younger and ambitious footballers are probably more motivated to be on Social Media as they look to not just make their own opinions about the game known, but also start to build a media profile for life after football. Managers meanwhile have either been “too busy” to take to Twitter or have harbored a cautious skepticism for a platform that regularly gets player sin trouble and into the back pages. For QPR however, they see the move as a refreshing way of opening up a dialogue with their fan base and capitalising on a time where there’s likely to be less criticism towards the manager.

QPR Multi-Media officer, Adam Hulme, told Digital-Football.com,

“At QPR we are always looking for new and innovative ways to engage and communicate with our fans through the club’s official Social Media channels. Many fans will only be able to hear Harry Redknapp’s thoughts and opinions by watching our live press conferences – streamed live via @OfficialQPR – or small snippets on TV, but without really having their ‘own’ questions answered.

It’s rare that football managers take time out to engage with their fans through Social Media. As Harry isn’t on Twitter, we thought we’d do the next best thing…#AskHarry!”

The move shows how Social Media is increasingly becoming a more and more influential consideration for not just marketing and engagement strategies, but also with press issues.

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