Richmond Tigers followers on Twitter
This is part of that series I’m doing on Twitter follower stats as a tool that a friend is developing gets refined. While we captured everything for the Storm, this only capture 1,099. We’re again missing quite a few and I’m not entirely certain what is up. (An earlier iteration with more fields picked up more. It just had other issues. I’m using the more recent iteration .) Richmond can be found at Richmond_FC on Twitter. They have 2,894 followers. That’s about 2/3rds the amount that St. Kilda has. (The big difference between the two is that St. Kilda appears to have an active follow pattern that Richmond does not have.)
Basic math out of the way, the following are the numbers for Richmond followers based on that sample of 1,099 followers:
| Math | ReTweets | Followers | Status Count | Friends | Listed |
| Mean | 0.005 | 661.65 | 612.80 | 493.610 | 17.67 |
| Median | 0 | 20 | 24 | 77.5 | 0 |
| Mode | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
These numbers are a lot higher than the Melbourne Storm, though not as high as St. Kilda. They average 479 more followers, 161 more friends and on average are included on 10 more lists. The big difference is that Richmond Tiger fans appear to update a lot less than Storm followers with an average of 170 less status dates and a median of 25 less status updates.
The Richmond Tigers only really have two power users with more than 10,000 plus followers. They are: michaelyardney and HootSuite. Both are also the only two people who follow more than 10,000+ people on Twitter. (Remember: This sample is less than half the complete set. There may be more.) On the other side, there are 53 people who follow only the Tigers or the Tigers and one other account.
670 people appear on zero lists. 116 people appear on one list. At the high end, ignoring HootSuite, fourteen accounts are listed on 100+ lists and four accounts that follow Richmond are listed on 200+ lists. The 100+ list accounts are: heraldsunscoop, NovaFM, PAFC, Geelong_FC, outfandishfans, superfooty, stkildafc, ryanknapp, SportsGeekHQ, haydencooper, michaelyardney, Adelaide_FC, Collingwood_FC, sammutimer . A lot of these are AFL related. (AFL clubs and media follow each other.)
156 people have never updated their Twitter account. That represents 14% of all Richmond followers. 443 people have updated 10 or less times. That represents 40% of all Richmond followers. That is a huge number of people who are just not updating frequently. It may suggest that people joined Twitter, followed their favorite team and then never bother to check again. (Or again, it may not. Some people may check Twitter with out updating. I know a few cases.) 8 of Richmond’s followers have updated their status 10,000+ times. These really active followers are: THETUBEtv, FtLauderDaniel, D3wizl, _Jessica_Maree, asmtegan, dottedwithearts, aflfeeds, dzufauzan. (In that select group of 10,000+ super updaters, they average 624 followers and 745 people they follow.)
Beyond these basic numbers, 720 people have visible time zones. Over half of these followers are in Melbourne time:
| Time Zone | Count | Percent |
| Melbourne | 372 | 51.74% |
| Hawaii | 83 | 11.54% |
| Sydney | 61 | 8.48% |
| Adelaide | 41 | 5.70% |
| Brisbane | 36 | 5.01% |
| Perth | 29 | 4.03% |
| Eastern Time (US & Canada) | 20 | 2.78% |
| London | 13 | 1.81% |
| Hobart | 9 | 1.25% |
| Pacific Time (US & Canada) | 9 | 1.25% |
| Central Time (US & Canada) | 8 | 1.11% |
| Alaska | 7 | 0.97% |
| Canberra | 7 | 0.97% |
| Darwin | 3 | 0.42% |
| Mountain Time (US & Canada) | 3 | 0.42% |
| Quito | 3 | 0.42% |
| Tokyo | 2 | 0.28% |
| Amsterdam | 1 | 0.14% |
| Athens | 1 | 0.14% |
| Berlin | 1 | 0.14% |
| Bucharest | 1 | 0.14% |
| Buenos Aires | 1 | 0.14% |
| Greenland | 1 | 0.14% |
| Hong Kong | 1 | 0.14% |
| Jakarta | 1 | 0.14% |
| Magadan | 1 | 0.14% |
| Monterrey | 1 | 0.14% |
| Osaka | 1 | 0.14% |
| Singapore | 1 | 0.14% |
| Tehran | 1 | 0.14% |
I still need an explanation as to why there are so many people in Hawaii who follow Australian sport teams… (Turns out a lot of Melbourne people are listing their timezone as Hawaiian…) Sydney appears third, Adelaide 4th, Brisbane 5th, and Perth 6th. This seems to match a bit with my understanding of the popularity of the AFL around Australia.
As for languages, 1 for DE, 2 for ES, 1 for FR (who lists his timezone as Greenland) and 1 for JA. This reflects a little less diversity than the Storm and the Saints. It may possibly suggest that the Tigers are less prone to getting spam followers than the other teams if one assumes that non-English language codes imply spam followers.
Either way, the Tigers seem much closer to the Storm than the Saints in terms of follower patterns. The big issue for me as some one looking at it for the good of the team is that they appear to have a really high inactive base that may suggest people aren’t continuing to read their message.
Are you comparing the frequency of updates by the club account (eg: Richmond FC) to the total number of followers and account updates by followers? I would expect there to be a correlation between an active lead account (the club) and the activity of the follower account (the person following the club). The Richmond FC Twitter is, almost exclusively, an example of one-way communication. In order to attract followers they need to develop a two-way model which would encourage interactivity.
There is a correlation between the total number of followers and the total number of status updates. That whole batch of numbers: Total followers, total follows, total list inclusion, total status updates all correlate extremely well.
Correlation: Followers Lists Status updates
Following 0.778141964 0.684398513 0.815722546
Followers 0.93756153 0.856884138
Lists 0.856608411
I’m not necessarily as interested in follow totals as I am interested in what the fans look like