Claxton Shield on Twitter
The Claxton Shield is the premiere competition in for baseball in Australia. It is organized by the Australian Baseball Federation and includes the Perth Heat, Victoria Aces, New South Wales Patriots, Queensland Rams teams. The competition is the one of the main things that has been consistent in the baseball community with two leagues having become defunct.
Looking around, the Australian baseball community does not appear to have a stronghold on social networks like bebo,blogger or LiveJournal. They do however have a small presence on Twitter: The extent of which is the account run by the Perth Heat. The team has 35 followers. Twitter Analyzer seems a bit off with their count for where followers come from for the team. It says that the Heat have 36 American followers, 4 Dutch followers, 4 Irish followers, 12 followers from Ecuador and 32 followers from Australians. Stats like those are why I have a huge problem with Twitter Analyzer but I’m not sure what tool does a better job at counting. The Perth Heat do a fairly good job at updating regularly, providing scores, links to updated rosters and their social profiles elsewhere. (They link to their Facebook fanpage, where they have 1,110 fans.) The one thing they don’t do particularly well is interact.
It seems like Twitter would be a great potential tool for Claxton Shield and its teams to market itself as Twitter ranks 12th in Australia according to Alexa. Second tier sports should definitely contemplate using it, in combination with YouTube and Facebook, to promote themselves so they can reach a wider audience. People can accidentally find their content through @ replies, retweets, related videos that can help develop more organic interest in them. If Australia is ever going to get another league like ABL and IBLA and have it be successful, this sort of thing needs to be done.