I’m still working on completing my various social media totals. Today, I was poking around Twitter and I’m still surprised at the number of teams that don’t have a presence. One league I looked at was Gridiron Australia. It isn’t a major league but it involves an American sport and it peaked my curiosity. Unsurprisingly, the size of the community on social media sites is tiny.
No teams have an official Twitter presence. The extent to which a team is on Twitter involves a player being there and Tweeting about the team. The player is @fatloaf. He plays for the WA Raiders. There other largest place to find the league is on Yahoo!Groups, where there are two lists dedicated to the WA Raiders: waraiders and raidersd. Outside of these scattered networks, there are a few fans on bebo. It seems likely there are probably a few other fans dedicated to the league and these teams. If they are, they are probably on more Australian specific networks or communities dedicated to the sport.
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Tags:
ACT Monarchs,
bebo,
NSW Wolfpack,
Queensland Sundevils,
SA Fire,
twitter,
Victorian Eagles,
WA Raiders,
Yahoo!Groups Category:
Gridiron Australia,
Twitter,
Yahoo!Groups,
bebo
I have spent about three hours looking through various lists to find official NBL twitter accounts, NBL fansites, and accounts for NBL management and players. NBL lists on Twitter are a bit different than comparable lists for say the A-League and even the Claxton Shield. They contain a lot more fans of a team, players that used to play in the NBL (but have gone to Europe or the US), sports management students, and journalists. It looks like if you mention the NBL, some people will add you to the list. To make sure I found actual player accounts on those lists, I compared names on accounts to the NBL player list and the Wikipedia player list.
I recorded if it was the official team account, or an unofficial account. Unofficial accounts are player, management or fansite accounts. I also recorded the number of followers an account had. Who are the most popular players on Twitter? What are the most popular teams?
One thing that surprised me was that not every team had an official account. It seems like they should have one, if only to squat on it to protect their future potential assets.
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Tags:
A-League,
Adelaide 36ers,
brisbane bullets,
Cairns Taipans,
Claxton Shield,
Gold Coast Blaze,
Melbourne Tigers,
NBL,
New Zealand Breakers,
Perth Wildcats,
South Dragons,
Sydney Kings,
Townsville Crocodiles,
twitter,
West Sydney Razorbacks,
Wollongong Hawks Category:
NBL,
Twitter
I’m not doing much of an analysis here as I’m still gathering data. One difference between these two leagues that I see right off the bat is the type of presence. For the A-League, there are a number of accounts created by fans dedicated to teams. There are a few player and coach accounts for the A-League but not many. The fan based accounts are just bigger, have more followers and appear more important to the fandom.
In comparison, the NBL appears to have a large number of players on Twitter. In some cases, the players appear to be at have decided to have staked out their own user name, if only to have it. Some engage but many don’t have images. A few have their tweets protected. Most don’t have branded backgrounds or even list that they are playing in the NBL.
That’s a big difference. Is this a result of league policy regarding the use of social media? Or is it a difference in sports culture, where NBL basketball players are say modeling NBA players and A-League players are emulating their European and America peers who appear to be less active on social networks?
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I finally finished compiling a list of LiveJournal and clones users who list various teams as an interest. The issues in doing this and other maps have been discussed in earlier posts. Not all cities are picked up by the software, not everyone lists the city they live in are two of the big ones. People can list multiple teams in the same league as interests (and thus be counted twice) or the same team as an interest across multiple clones (again, counted twice).
While teams from many leagues were looked at, not all those teams had people listing them as an interest and where the individual listed their city of residence. The following leagues did though: AFL, AFL Canberra, A-League, ANZ Championship, First class cricket, NBL, NRL, NSW Premier League, Rugby League/State of Origin, Super 14, and Victorian Amateur Football Association. To make the map more readable, some of the least represented leagues were left off the map.
The following map was created using MapPoint:
 |
|
Play by City
 |
220 |
 |
15 |
 |
1 |
 |
AFL |
 |
A-League |
 |
NBL |
 |
NRL |
 |
Super 14 |
|
|
The map clearly shows a geographic preference in New South Wales for the NRL. Victoria clearly prefers the AFL. The rest of the country tends to also support the AFL. The pattern of geographic distribution for fans of these leagues appears to fit patterns I have seen described elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if these patterns hold for bebo.
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Tags:
A-League,
AFL,
AFL Canberra,
ANZ Championship,
bebo,
First class cricket,
LiveJournal,
NBL,
NRL,
NSW Premier League,
Rugby League/State of Origin,
Super 14,
Victorian Amateur Football Association Category:
A-League,
AFL,
LiveJournal,
NBL,
NRL
