ANZ Championship on Twitter
I’ve spent the past two hours or so culling through various netball related Twitter lists, checking lists that included ANZ Championship teams and players. After having done that, it looks like five teams have a Twitter presence: Adelaide Thunderbirds, Melbourne Vixens, New South Wales Swifts, Queensland Firebirds, and West Coast Fever. For the Thunderbirds, there are two accounts: @AdelaideTBirds and @NatTbirds. The first is a team account and the second is the personal account of a player. The Vixens similarly have two accounts, one for the team and a player with a personal account: @MelbourneVixens and @SharelleVixens. The same situation exists for the New South Wales Swifts: @nswswifts and @SusanSwifts. For the Queensland Firebirds and West Coast Fever, single players have accounts but the teams do not appear to have an official Twitter presence: @laurafirebirds and @SusanWCFever.
For the team accounts, the Thunderbirds have 62 followers, the Vixens have 904 followers and the Swifts have 90 followers. This puts the average at 352 followers per team because the 904 skews the numbers really high. If that is excluded, the average is 76. For player accounts, the average number of followers is 208.8. The highest number is 400, for the Vixens player. The lowest is 66 for the West Coast Fever player. These numbers are comparable to several of the A-League related Twitter accounts.
Using Twitter Analyzer, the location of the followers of these accounts was determined and the following table was generated:
ANZ Championship on Twitter
| Thunderbirds | Vixens | Swifts | Firebirds | Fever | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Country | |||||
| Australia | 25 | 623 | 240 | 260 | 78 |
| Chile | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| China | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Ecudador | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Germany | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Greenland | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| India | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Israel | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| New Zealand | 2 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 6 |
| Thailand | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| United Kingdom | 5 | 18 | 15 | 25 | 15 |
| United States | 6 | 135 | 75 | 65 | 42 |
| Total | 38 | 812 | 335 | 350 | 153 |
| % Australia | 65.80% | 76.70% | 71.60% | 74.30% | 51.00% |
| % Chile | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 2.00% |
| % China | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 2.00% |
| % Ecudador | 0.00% | 1.10% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| % Germany | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 3.90% |
| % Greenland | 0.00% | 1.10% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| % India | 0.00% | 1.10% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| % Israel | 0.00% | 1.10% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| % New Zealand | 5.30% | 0.00% | 1.50% | 0.00% | 3.90% |
| % Thailand | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| % United Kingdom | 13.20% | 2.20% | 4.50% | 7.10% | 9.80% |
| % United States | 15.80% | 16.60% | 22.40% | 18.60% | 27.50% |
The West Coast Fever (represented by their Tweeting player) had the smallest Australian audience and the Melbourne Vixens had the largest percentage Australian audience. I still believe these numbers are questionably reliable, that people are lying about their location of that there is a huge problem with spam followers on Twitter. Why? The Melbourne Vixens have 9 followers from Greenland. Googling for Greenland and Netball doesn’t bring up any information about sport in the country. Given that, it doesn’t make sense that the Vixens would have that huge of a following from the country.
If you’re interested in following ANZ Championship teams and players on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list @ozziesport/anzchampionship.