Ozzie Sport

I’m trying to improve my list of sporting events on Foursquare as the NRL, AFL, Super Rugby and ANZ Championship leagues all get started this very shortly. The winter season appears to have fewer women’s sports taking place so I really want to make sure that I have a good list. Any help improving this list would be fantastic.

Why am I interested in Foursquare? Because the audience that uses Foursquare tends to be very engaged in social media. It seems to be that if there is a very engaged audience, it is good for netball as it means that the community is self propagating and isn’t limiting itself to a narrow community. It suggests that teams like the Melbourne Vixens, who have an official Foursquare account, are smart to market online in order to reach their audience. Checkins to different event types can help to explain who is using Foursquare in the netball community. (Are fans checking into games? Are referees checking into to training sessions? Are players checking into carnivals?) The type of person checking in can help people in the netball community can help stakeholders develop strategies to best engage in outreach.

I’ve tracked a few netball related events already. The table below includes total checkins to these events on Foursquare.

None of these are particularly major events. Thus, checkin totals being small is not surprising. (And is anyone surprised that people aren’t checking into umpire training?) What I’m more interested in is how the ANZ Championship performs, especially when compared to the WNBL and W-League. I’d also like to see how netball clubs do when the local seasons actually start. The following list includes the events I will be tracking:

Is there anything missing? I know a lot of things are missing. I can find pages like Netball New South Wales’s list of carnivals. The problem with lists like these is they often don’t tell you the location. This was a huge problem when I was looking for where the Silver Ferns were playing: I couldn’t find the facility. (And ticket buying integration was awful. They wanted to sell packages but didn’t link them to games.) (Not a problem just for netball. I had this problem with Australian hockey.) Beyond that, when location is known, it is hard to determine what the location is on Foursquare. I was trying to find North Turramurra so I could try to add some of the events on North Turramurra’s website and just major fail. Meep.

If you love netball, any help by improving this list would be fantastic. Long term, it would be great to be able to add netball to a map like this. Thanks!

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) netball related Twitter accounts (January 20)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts