Melbourne Storm followers on Twitter
Still refining the tool where I can get the location and other data from all the followers for accounts. We can’t quite figure out how to check the verified account fields yet. Some fields appear only in tweets but not on profiles. Line breaks in profile descriptions are occassionally causing issues. My if/then location field isn’t working right. (Apparently fuzzy logic may need to be applied to allow for that as “Melbourne” is not appending as “Melbourne, Victoria, Australia” for me.) I decided to look at the Melbourne Storm today because I thought it might be interesting.
The official account for the Melbourne Storm is MelbStormRLC. They have 1,757 and we got information from all the accounts following it. For the major categories involving numbers, I got the mean, median and mode:
| ReTweets | Followers | Status Count | Friends | Listed | |
| Mean | 0.006254343 | 182.0159453 | 782.9430524 | 332.3933865 | 7.16543069 |
| Median | 0 | 33 | 49 | 114 | 0 |
| Mode | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
The numbers are very, very low when compared to AFL based St. Kilda Saints. The Saints have around 140 people who have 10,000+ followers and 15 people with 100,000+ followers and that’s with only half their followers counted. In contrast, the Melbourne Storm have no one 10,000+ followers. They also have no one who follows that many people. On the opposite end of the ladder, there are 52 (or 2%) people who follow only the Storm or the Storm and one other person.
Overall these stats suggest that people who follow the Melbourne Storm are not particularly active on Twitter: They don’t follow that many people, they aren’t followed by people, they update infrequently and they don’t appear on many lists. What these stats don’t tell is how often these people check Twitter. Some people might check Twitter often but not update and follow many people. (Different people use Twitter differently. It would be really interesting to see a survey that asked people how often they check Twitter and why they check Twitter.)
Beyond that, 1,308 people have their timezone information available in their profiles. (It might actually be more and this could be a problem in our data collection… but let’s pretend that this is representative of the whole group despite evidence to support that.) The following is a count by timezone:
| Time Zone | Count | Percent |
| Melbourne | 583 | 44.6% |
| Sydney | 254 | 19.4% |
| Hawaii | 153 | 11.7% |
| Brisbane | 128 | 9.8% |
| London | 40 | 3.1% |
| Auckland | 24 | 1.8% |
| Canberra | 20 | 1.5% |
| Pacific Time (US & Canada) | 17 | 1.3% |
| Perth | 15 | 1.1% |
| Wellington | 12 | 0.9% |
| Hobart | 10 | 0.8% |
| Adelaide | 8 | 0.6% |
| Quito | 6 | 0.5% |
| Central Time (US & Canada) | 5 | 0.4% |
| Eastern Time (US & Canada) | 5 | 0.4% |
| Darwin | 3 | 0.2% |
| Greenland | 3 | 0.2% |
| Hong Kong | 3 | 0.2% |
| Alaska | 2 | 0.2% |
| Paris | 2 | 0.2% |
| Rome | 2 | 0.2% |
| Singapore | 2 | 0.2% |
| Abu Dhabi | 1 | 0.1% |
| Amsterdam | 1 | 0.1% |
| Arizona | 1 | 0.1% |
| Bangkok | 1 | 0.1% |
| Caracas | 1 | 0.1% |
| Edinburgh | 1 | 0.1% |
| Guam | 1 | 0.1% |
| Jakarta | 1 | 0.1% |
| Jerusalem | 1 | 0.1% |
| Lima | 1 | 0.1% |
| Tehran | 1 | 0.1% |
Unsurprisingly, given that the team is based in Melbourne, that timezone is the most popular, accounting for 44% of the team’s followers. Sydney time, the area where NRL is dominant, accounts for 20%. I’m not certain how to explain the popularity of the Melbourne Storm in Hawaiian time. Brisbane makes sense as again, the area is an NRL stronghold.
In profile descriptions, 36 people mention the word Storm and 103 mention Melbourne. That seems like a fairly significant amount of people expressing team loyalty and seems comparable to the Saints.
Four people list a language code of ES and three people list FR. That’s less diversity than St. Kilda in terms of language. Still, the French ones seem more explainable than the ones for St. Kilda because rugby is played in France and players sometimes go there to play for French teams. It can help to develop an audience in Australia for the team.
The Melbourne Storm don’t have as many followers as the more popular AFL teams but they do have more followers than the Canberra Raiders. The controversy early in the season helped to boost their numbers and they’ve been much more interactive of late. … Or at least, they’ve relied less on TwitterFeed for content. That was a huge problem early on in the season. Beyond that, these numbers look realistic: They appear to be getting an audience of Melbourne based and Australian NRL fans following them. Most of the people following them update occassionally and have few enough followers that they will see the content that the Storm update with. That’s probably the ideal that people should be aiming for. Yeah, people with 100,000 followers are awesome, especially if you can get a ReTweet but they’ll never see your tweet and in the case of St. Kilda, a lot of those people with massive follower counts are just not in their ideal demographic.