Anyway, the basic math for the Swans followers statistics:

Beyond that, what I was most interested in was the location of Sydney Swans fans. Would they be centered around Sydney? I put the locations on a map and this is what it looks like… (Yes, huge fan base around Sydney. At the same time, large fanbase around Melbourne and scattered fans/followers around the globe.)

View full map

The raw data set used for this can be found at TwitterSwans.xls.

Related Posts:

• What domains in #afl related tweets get the most RT@ ReTweets?
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers

That out of the way, there 10,412 total tweets that could be examined. The list of keywords used can be found at using my raw data. Duplicate Tweets were removed bringing the total to 6,313 unique tweets. Tweets that did not include a url were removed. This brought the Tweet total down to 2,892 tweets. (About 46% of AFL related Tweets include a URL. This compares to 52% of AFL related Tweets with #hashtags.) There were 2,941 urls in these Tweets, with 2,582 unique urls in these Tweets. Of these, there were 623 unique domains. For all AFL related Tweets with urls, the following domains were the most popular:

Of the Tweets with urls, only 342 of them were ReTweets. That means about 5% of AFL related ReTweets contain domains. (Compare that to ReTweets containing #hashtags: 8%.) There were 150 domains mentioned Amongst those, the following domains were the most popular:

The domains that are ReTweeted are interesting. It is really easy to link spam on Twitter and some people and organizations do. If you look at some accounts, they post view TwitterFeed. Beyond that, you can tell when looking at a URL list that automated link posting is happening because the account may be using a URL shortener that isn’t as popular and the URLs tend to follow a sequence. The AFL and various news services put out URLs and they just aren’t getting ReTweeted at the same rate that they are getting posted. What is getting ReTweeted? People’s pictures and club related links.

Looking at both the domain list and the Domain ReTweet list, one thing that stands out for me is the lack of Wikipedia links. Wikipedia ranks really high on Google and other search engines. The AFL related content is highly ranked. The AFL articles are often really, really, really good and they are updated frequently. They can be really useful when looking for historical information. Thus, I’m surprised that there were only 3 references to Wikipedia. What gives? Why isn’t Wikipedia being cited more?

Moving on, 488 accounts were mentioned in the 343 ReTweets with URLs. The following table gives an idea as to who the most popular mentions were:

That Essendon and Sydney were amongst the most mentioned doesn’t come as a surprise: Their domains were highly ranked. What is a bit surprising that the Blues aren’t highly ranked; they ranked highly for mentions with #hashtags. St. Kilda ranked highly on both lists. I half want to attribute this to the idea that their audience may be more Twitter savvy than other clubs’s fans. I’d have thought players might have been higher on this list but they really don’t appear to be a factor. This may suggest that players are not Tweeting urls or that content isn’t what their fans are interested in.

The lesson of these two posts is that if you want your AFL related tweets reposted, be partisan in your support and link to official club content that the news services haven’t yet written about yet.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• What #afl related hashtags get the most RT @ ReTweets?
• Most popular AFL and NRL teams on Facebook

I have a collection of AFL related tweets that I update semi-regularly. More often than not, I use these for geographic related analysis. My AFL tweet collection has a series of issues though that make me hesitant to always draw definitive conclusions from it. These issues include:

• Incomplete tweet set for keywords: I only get what is available from Searchtastic.
• Incomplete tweet set based on keyword limitations: Even supposing I could get all the tweets related to a keyword, I can’t find every reference to the AFL as there are too many possible words that could reference the AFL and its clubs.
• Incomplete tweet set because of time: Some keywords were searched for earlier and some later. Not all keywords were looked at over the same period.
• Irrelevant tweets: Keywords like #gosaints may refer to the St. Kilda Saints or the New Orleans Saints. AFL may refer to the AFL-CIO, a union in the United States. Unless every tweet is examined, irrelevant tweets will remain in the data set.

These are major obstacles to doing any sort of content analysis for Twitter when specific subgroups are looked at. Many of these issues are ones that other researchers are likely to have too: You can’t get the complete data set, will include garbage data and may not be entirely timely.

That said, despite these limitations, I still wanted to know what are the most popular #hashtags for AFL related tweets and what type of hashtags are likely to be ReTweeted.

To get my dataset of Tweets, first I went to Searchtastic, ran a series of searches over the course of 6 weeks, and exported those results to Excel. I noted the keyword I searched for and the team that keyword is related to. The keyword searches that were run on Searchtastic during this period included: #afl, #aflbluestigers, #aflcatslions, #afldemonsswans, #afldogscats, #afldogsfreo, #afldogspower, #afleaglesblues, #aflfooty, #aflhawksdemons, #aflkangasbombers, #aflkangasfreo, #AFLPAQUIZ, #aflpiestigers, #aflpowercrows, #aflpowereagles, #aflsaintshawks, #aflswanshawks , #brisbanelions, #dreamteam, #footy, #fremantle, #freo, #freo AFL, #goblues, #gobombers, #Gocats, #gocrows, #gopies, #gosaints, #goswans, #NMFC, #northmelbourne, #sackermanis, #supercoach, #sydneyswans, #teamgws, #thekennel, #wafl, #westcoast afl, ackermanis sacked, ACT4GWS, Adelaide Crows, Adelaide_FC, afl Bombers, AFL GWS, AFL Magpies, afl pies, AFL Tony Lockett, Aker Bulldogs, Akermanis, akermanis dogs, akermanis gillard, Australian rules, blues afl, Brad Johnson, Brad Johnson AFL, Brady Rawlings, brisbane afl, Brisbane Lions, Brownlow Medal, Cameron Mooney cats, Carlton Blues, Chris Judd Carlton, Collingwood, collingwood AFL, Collingwood Magpies, crows afl, Damien Hardwick, DemonsHQ, Dockers AFL, eagles afl, eagles perth, Eric Mackenzie , Essendon afl, Essendon Bombers, etihad kilda, folau afl, folau israel, Fremantle Dockers, fremantle ruckman, GCFC, geelong cats, Gold Coast Suns, harry_o, Hawthorn Hawks, HawthornFC, Jason Akermanis, Jeff Kennett, Judd Blues, kilda, kilda AFL, kilda riewoldt, lions afl, Mark Harvey, mcg kilda, Melbourne Demons, milburn cats, Nathan van Berlo Crows, North Melbourne Kangaroos, PAFC, Peter Szental, Port Adelaide Power, portadelaidefc, Richmond Football, Richmond Tigers, Rodney Eade dogs, roos afl, sackermanis, spoon eagles, spoon lions, spoon tigers, spoon wce, swans afl, swans footy, swans ruckman, Sydney Swans, tigers afl, Travis Johnstone, Trent Cotchin, WCE AFL, West Coast Eagles, and Western Bulldogs. These keywords represent all teams and often include multiple keywords for them.

The next step was to remove all duplicate tweets. As some tweets contain multiple keywords and some searches were run more than once over that 6-week time period, that possibility existed. To do this, three columns were copy and pasted to a new worksheet: Username, Tweet and In Reply To. On Excel, I did this using Filter -> Advanced Filter -> Unique records only. This process took the total tweets from 8,523 to 5,427.

The third step was to identify all the hash tags used in this data set. To do this, I copy and pasted all the tweets to Notepad. I ran a find and replace for [space]# and replaced with [tab]#. I copy and pasted these back, removed all cells that did not start with a #. After this was done, the data set was copy and pasted back to Notepad. Another find and replace was done, this time, [space] was replaced with [tab]. This was pasted back to excel and all cells that did not start with # were deleted. The completed list was 2,833 total hashtags used. Of these, 556 were unique. The following table counts their total usage:

The next step was to count the total @ replies and hashtag uses. To do this, all the unique tweets were copied to a new worksheet. A filter was created to list all tweets that did not include an @ sign. These tweets were deleted. This brought the total tweets from 5,427 to 1,844. The next step was to create a filter to show all tweets that did not include a #. These tweets were then deleted. This brought the total Tweets down to 832. The next step was to look remove tweets that did not contain “RT @”, “RT:@”, “retweeting @”, “retweet @”, “via @”, “thx @”, “HT @”, or “r @”. This leaves 458 tweets that are retweets that contain hash tags.

The same process was conducted to count the hash tags that was used for all hash tags and RT @. The following list was created of people who were the most ReTweeted (or mentioned in the ReTweeted tweet) where the tweets contained #hashtags and the #hashtag totals for ReTweets. These were then totaled and counted, resulting in the following table:

Based on this sample, (because the whole of the population of AFL tweets is not available and cannot the total cannot be counted to determine the representative value of the sample) the most RTed #hashtag in a Tweet related to the AFL is #gosaints. #dreamteam comes in second. #gocats comes in third. #afl comes in fourth.

The #gosaints tag is popular and the team’s official account has encouraged its use. More recently, New Orleans Saints fans have used it as the NFL pre-season has started. #dreamteam is one of the two most popular AFL fantasy leagues and those fantasy leagues are big into fostering community. Beyond these top four, the most popular tags tend to involve specific match ups. If all tags related to match ups had been included around the time that the games took place, it is highly possible more would be on that list.

In terms of who gets RTed and mentioned in ReTweets, official accounts dominate: The AFL, Carlton, St. Kilda, Hawthorn, the Bombers, Geelong and the Swans. The first non-team account to appear is P. Diddy and he is followed by a number of influential Australian social media people. The next person / non-official AFL account to appear is Julia Gillard. AFL players do not appear to be ReTweeted en masse when compared to their club sides. This isn’t to say that people don’t actively read and follow them. If looking at ReTweets without #hashtags, @harry_o would appear on top with 50 mentions. It is probable that clubs are using #hashtags and players are not; there could be a digital cultural awareness divide between the two.

A copy of the data and some of my step by step process making it workable can be found at RTAFL.xls. I find the whole thing really interesting. If anyone has any tools to make dataming easier or has a suggestion for additional research in this area, let me know as I’d love to hear it.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular AFL and NRL teams on Facebook
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

That said, I still want to look at Yahoo!Groups and their history in Australia’s sports fandom.  The first team I am looking at is the Sydney Swans.  There are fourteen groups listed in Yahoo!Groups Sydney Swans category.  Of these, six are actually dedicated to the Sydney Swans.  These are rainbow_swans, sydneyswansfc, redandwhiteonline, sydneyswanscentral, judeboltonandthesydneyswans, and swanniesfansunited.

All the Sydney Swans mailing lists were created in a window between October 1998 and October 2003, with one created in both those months and the other four created in 2001.  (In 2000, Yahoo!Groups acquired egroups and by 2001, they had migrated those mailing lists over.  In 2001, Yahoo!Groups had also lifted the ban on adult mailing lists.  Neither of these events likely explains the 2001 surge in group creation.  Other factors such as general internet connectivity and ease of creation of mailing lists on Yahoo!Groups compared to other tools like majordomo probably do a much better job at explaining this surge.)

All of these mailing lists  are currently pretty dead, with the exception of occasional spam posting.   I looked at each list to determine when spam content started and legitimate posting ended.  The total posting volume for these lists was then gathered and the following chart was created:

Mailing list volume in 2009 was a result of activity that was taking place on rainbow_swans, a mailing list for GLBT fans of the team.  Volume across all lists peaked in September 2005, the month that the team won their last Grand Final.  This activity all took place on rainbow_swans.  The month after their victory, volume dropped from 49 to 10 but there was activity on three lists.  The second major peak was in August 2006.  This was a month before the team appeared in the Grand Final, which they lost.  The volume was ten less than the previous year and, again, all took place on one list.  September, when they actually played in the finals, volume was significantly less at 26 total posts.

Overall, activity levels for the team’s fans on Yahoo!Groups tends to correlate with the team’s overall performance and when they are playing games during the season.

Related Posts:

• The AFL on Yahoo!Groups
• Has there been a population shift for the AFL on Dreamwidth Studios since June?
• Most popular AFL and NRL teams on Facebook
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter