NRL and official facebook fan page fail
The NRL could really learn a lesson from the AFL for Facebook. Having looked through most of the official sites to try to find official Facebook pages, I’ve made the following observations:
- The South Sydney Rabbitohs site links to the Facebook page for the Canberra Raiders.
- The St. George Illawarra Dragons and New Zealand Warriors sites links to Facebook.com, not to their fanpages.
- Several teams do not have Facebook fanpages.
- The Melbourne Storm and Canberra Raiders have user pages with limited public profiles.
- The Melbourne Storm user profile is for the team’s mascot.
These patterns suggest that the NRL is behind the ball with their use of social networking. Social networking is important tool for building a fanbase, selling merchandise, etc. There is a correlation between attendance at matches and the size of a team’s online social networking fan base. I’m not certain what factors lead to this and the variables could be totally independent but either way, they need to improve their fan engagement.
(The links were found on the NRL hosted team sites. These are not official team sites but are official NRL league pages.)