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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Twitter has increasingly become the first destination for football fans to read and write comments regarding matches and incidents. Recently, there were articles on how the Manchester derby generated 1 million tweets or how the Barcelona – Chelsea Champions League semi-final reached a peak of 13,684 tweets per second. Another article written by Digital-Football.com, indicated that there are nearly 29 million users following football clubs on Twitter.

We can expect even greater volumes of tweets in the coming days and months. The Champions League final on Saturday will, undoubtedly, break another Twitter record. And the next record-breaker after that could be during the Euro 2012 tournament.

Without a doubt, Twitter has become a primary channel for football conversation and combined with the “breaking news” nature of micro-blogging, has to be viewed as a serious communication channel. Dalglish was the Premier League’s only manager on Twitter and his sacking now means that Celtic manager, Neil Lennon, is the only manager in charge of a European team to be active on the micro-blogging platform.

The excellent FootyTwits site has launched an Android app for Euro 2012, where you can track mentions of your national team on Twitter. Keep an eye out over the next few weeks for more stats.

The post Kenny Dalglish sacking generates 3k tweets per minute on Twitter appeared first on Digital-Football.com - Football Social Media & Digital Sports news.

European football clubs like Liverpool FC and AS Roma have also started pushing visual content by utilising the rapidly growing network – Pinterest. Furthermore, LFC recently launched a tumblr blog in order to offer visual treasures from the club’s past and cash in on this.

On Monday FC Bayern Munich started a closed beta of myFCB.de, the club’s own community that is supposed to become the “Facebook for all Bayern Munich fans”. But is this the right way to play the ball?

The Bavarian champion boast 3.3m Facebook fans and are by far the biggest audience of the Bundesliga clubs on Facebook, followed by current champion Borussia Dortmund with 1m fans and FC Schalke 04 with 480,000 supporters. However, Bayern Munich are the only Bundesliga club with no official Twitter Account (list of other club accounts here). Besides having had a PR crisis with their fake new player PR stunt gone wrong on Facebook, the fanpage grows by approximately 10,000 Fans per day. According to a Sports+Markt research the club had 20.7m fans in 2010 (10m in Germany, 10.7m from other countries).

The new community will share many Facebook-esque features: fans can share, comment and rate content. Additionally, the network has its own version of “Like” buttons with the “Guad” button (Bavarian for good) and the “Net Guad” button (no good) for content rating. Fans are  provided with tools to organize their fan clubs, schedules and daily fan events. Currently the old forum from the club’s homepage is being migrated across to integrate with the new community. The beta version of myfcb is scheduled to end late March and according to my first tests many features still need to be rolled out entirely and improved (no photo uploads via smartphone, no functioning facebook connect api, no english version etc).

Lorenz Beringer (Project Manager Social Media with FCB) said that FC Bayern Munich aim to engage 300,000 fans with myfcb within the first year. Furthermore by creating their own fan community the club is looking into exploiting opportunities of data collection and analysis as well as referring opportunities for partners. It’s no surprise that this move by Bayern has ROI opportunities as part of its strategy – especially as clubs are eager to generate alternate revenues from Social Media.

But first of all the community has to reach the fans and provide real values – especially beyond the club’s Facebook offering. Facebook will always be way ahead in terms of functionalities, features and social community. Building up an bespoke plattform leads to enormous costs regarding personal and financial resources, knowledge, responsibilities etc. The club has to control and manage the complete community now (possible copy rights infringements, insults, rumors etc.). Furthermore, there are questions regarding transparency and there’s the possibility fans may view content with a lack of credibility: it’s hard to host a balanced dialogue on ones’ branded environment – something Manchester City’s Richard Ayers stated in a recent interview (Richard favours a tactics of natural growth and working together with relevant forums, blogs, communities etc.).

In the end it will come down to the experiences and content (besides offers generated from their partner’s interests). If myFCB only copies the club’s experience and content activities from their Facebook Fanpage, it will be pretty much of “a costly but useless little monster”.  A lot of creativity and a delighted content strategy (also the definition of the precise roles of Facebook and myfcb) is needed to lure the fans into this new home and reach the tipping point.

The post FC Bayern Munich launches its own Facebook with myFCB appeared first on Digital-Football.com - Football Social Media & Digital Sports news.

Just goes to show how fanatical some fans are about their team!

To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it but I felt it was worth a post on the site as it goes to show that there is interesting fan generated content out there – particularly from fanatics as big as this. This is exactly the type of content that fans enjoy watching – something quirky, different but in the spirit of the club. Hopefully, LFC pick the video up and do something with it in the social space.

Manchester City’s Richard Ayers spoke recently about the importance of sharing the experience of being a fan of the club – communicating the passion to audiences that perhaps don’t follow the game. At the minute the video has 6,332 views on YouTube but if LFC can get this video going viral, then they open a whole world of PR opportunities that could help promote their brand further overseas as well as be seen to be really getting involved with their fans. This video would make a perfect addition to their new Pinterest board.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBzwJPkwwDg&feature=player_embedded

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