In a rather novel move this morning,\u00a0Tony Fernandes<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the QPR owner and Chairman \u2013\u00a0used Twitte<\/a>r to ask for ideas about the types of players\u00a0Queens Park Rangers<\/a>\u00a0fans wanted to see in the future.\u00a0Fernandes has been a huge advocate for Social Media<\/a>\u00a0in the last few months he has been in charge at the Premiership side, having seen the fruits of success in previous businesses\u00a0Air Asia<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Lotus F1 team<\/a>. Fernandes was quick to mention that QPR manager,\u00a0Neil Warnock<\/a>, called the shots in terms of transfers \u2013 but he was interested to hear about the fans hopes\/expectations.<\/p>\n

Since day 1 of taking over the club Fernandes has been instrumental in getting the football club into the Social Media sphere. Refreshingly, Fernandes has listened and talked to the fans, and clearly recognises that Sports Social Media should revolve around the fanbase, and not just the clubs own brand.<\/p>\n

Since the start of the season, Digital-Football research shows that QPR has seen a 39% growth in it\u2019s Twitter following, as well as a staggering 49% increase in the number of Facebook fans \u2013 the highest growth for any EPL Facebook page.<\/p>\n

It is truly great to see such a busy and influential owner take time and effort (as well as investment) to properly engage with the fans and look for longer term solutions for Social Media, rather than just spamming followers with merchandise\/RSS feeds \u2013 as many continue to do so. By asking his fans about transfer expectations over Twitter, Fernandes can firstly ensure that he isn\u2019t seen as being supportive to his manager regarding transfer budgets, and secondly, he can get his own idea about the fans expectations. Thirdly, and most importantly, it shows that he cares about his fans \u2013 one of the biggest gaps in football at the minute is the lack of affinity between the stereotypical \u2018penny pinching boardroom\u2019 and the passionate \u2018spend spend spend\u2019 fanbase.<\/p>\n

The strategy is very similar of\u00a0Tony Evans and his Twitter vote for transfer targets for Stockport County<\/a>in August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a rather novel move this morning,\u00a0Tony Fernandes\u00a0\u2013 the QPR owner and Chairman \u2013\u00a0used Twitter to ask for ideas about the types of players\u00a0Queens Park Rangers\u00a0fans wanted to see in the future.\u00a0Fernandes has been...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6176121807,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[69,61,27,67,71],"tags":[41,38,48,47,28],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n