Ozzie Sport

Yes, this is version three of what amounts to the same list with diminishing numbers of people included. I just have a fondness for these categories and want to pull out what I consider to be important segments of the sport fandom community based on my interests.

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• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) netball related Twitter accounts (January 20)
• Most popular female Australian (and NZ) sport related Twitter accounts (March 23)
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This is an updated version of previous posts.   If any organisation or athlete is missing, please leave a comment.

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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

The following is a list of the most popular Australian and New Zealand related Twitter accounts. The list also includes world related accounts. If anyone is missing, please comment to let me know. I spent about a half hour searching for accounts I was missing today and this may not be as comprehensive as I thought.  If any of my league, teams and description labels are off or are not as accurate as they could be, please comment to let me know.

Any surprises in terms of ranking on this list?

Edited to add:
I’ve added bendunn43, NetballCoach, and BallsNGiggles to my list for future monitoring.

If there are any additional accounts I’m missing, let me know. Any accounts added will appear on versions of most popular women’s list and most popular AU/NZ sport general list.

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and NZ) sport related Twitter accounts (March 23)
• Most popular female Australian (and NZ) sport related Twitter accounts (February 23)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)

This packet contains raw information.    It is provided as a courtesy to the wider community to give benchmarks for information pertaining to the online communities for the Australian and Kiwi women’s sport.   The hope is that others can use this information to do a greater student of this important community.  The packet is licensed using a creative commons license.  Please feel free to share this.

If you are involved with women’s sport in Australia or New Zealand, please get in touch with me.  I would love to talk to you about this data to better understand the backend of what is driving some of these numbers.  If you’re in Canberra or Sydney, I’d love to do a coffee.

Any feedback people have regarding this data and the small accompanying analysis would be appreciated.  A lot of what I think is going on is based on my own history in media fandom, and based on what I learn about Australian sport through my ongoing research. I sometimes get bogged down in numbers and don’t always understand why numbers are they are, just that they are that way.

If anyone wants a similar packet about Australian sport (like the AFL or NRL or the A-League), please get in touch and I can see what I can do.  I’m generally pretty happy to share my data.

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This list is far from complete. It is a beginning attempt on my part to really start to work on it. I’m hoping the labels regarding official/unofficial pages are accurate but they are worth double checking just to be sure. If you know of any fanpages or groups I should be watching that aren’t on this list, comment to let me know.

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Bebo is a social networking site that is popular in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The site’s traffic has been down in the past year or so. It traditionally has has a fairly large contingent of Australian sport fans, with most people being fans of the NRL. It has a smaller population of fans for other sports like the AFL and NBL. There were questions regarding bebo’s viability for most of 2010, when there were rumors that the site would be shut down if it failed to find a buyer. This and a variety of other factors, such as the popularity of Facebook and YouTube, have led to a lot of once active users becoming inactive.
Despite the issues regarding inactivity, it is a site worth looking at to begin to give a snapshot of sorts back in time, to understand the size of Australian and Kiwi women’s sport fandom four years ago to a year ago, when activity levels dropped off. It might be possible to determine where these fans migrated to by looking at growth on other niche networks, which could be useful for determining engagement strategies. This data can also give an idea as to what was popular. If the comparative levels of interest on other networks are not similar, it could suggest that clubs have failed with their marketing strategies or have found a method to really engage in their audience that other clubs could benefit from.

When looking at bebo, there are a variety of ways to do that. One of the first is to use search result totals, and compare the size of the community to other teams and over time. The second way is to look at the size groups/views for videos. The third way is to look at the demographic data for people who lit the team as an interest. This will be broken down by league/federation.

Search: ANZ Championship
The ANZ Championship is the most successful women’s (semi) professional league in Australia.  It makes sense that the team would have the largest amount of interest on bebo.  While this is true,  the community size, the number of groups and videos created by these fans is still extremely limited.  (Their counterparts in the AFL often have 200 to 400 people who list them as an interest.)

Search: AWIHL
This is a niche league, where the men’s team also fail to have people who list them as an interest. If there is an ice hockey fan base in Australia, it is not on bebo.

W-League
Somewhat surprisingly, the W-League fanbase on bebo appears to be a bit larger than that of the ANZ Championship. One possible factor for this could be that the overall fan community for soccer is really large on bebo. Another contributing factor could be that the Canberra United attract male fans to the sport that a W-League team may not otherwise get because the United do not have to compete with an A-League club in their city: If you love soccer in Canberra, you support the top level competitions here. Bebo also has a community of people who uploaded videos. Soccer videos are really popular across the whole of the network. Given that, W-League fans may be part of a larger part of video uploading culture that ANZ Championship fans are removed from.

One issue at play with W-League results is that Canberra United content is easier to pull out than the Melbourne Victory, because secondary keywords are needed to differentiate Melbourne Victory W-League results from A-League results. This means that real numbers for the W-League teams could be understated. Similar issues of a sort exist for the W-League, which shares a name with an American women’s soccer competition. This could lead to an over representation when just that term is counted.

WNBL
The WNBL is the premiere women’s basketball competition in Australia. Unlike the NBL, it does not include a New Zealand team. The problem with one of the teams looked at, the West Coast Waves, is that the name is a rather common phrase and almost none of the video results look relevant to the WNBL team. This type of issue can be a huge problem for women’s (and men) sport when doing promotion and reputation management for the club’s brand beyond the players.

WNCL
The WNCL teams being looked at do not share the name issues that their WNBL counterparts share. Unfortunately, they may suffer a problem with not all results being shown as they often have names with sponsors in them. Official and player content may pull up sponsor named related names. The average fan is less likely to use them as fannish identities are not based around who sponsors them.

Search: Women’s World Cup Soccer
The Matildas are Australia’s national women soccer team. As the W-League is larger than the ANZ Championship, it is not surprising that there is a comparable elevated amount of interest in the team.

Videos: W-League
Only the W-League Canberra United team were checked. Some of the videos for the team had quite a number of views. bebo’s stagnation is quite clear when looking at this data as the number of views for all videos failed to increase between June 3 and November 26.

People: ANZ Championship
The table below includes the demographic data for people who listed ANZ Championship teams as interests on bebo. This data tends to confirm that teams have local interest and don’t have national fan bases.

People: Basketball Australia
The Australian Opals have a similar issue with a few other Australian sport teams: People could use these words but not mean the team. This makes a bit of sense, given that one of the people who list the Opals as an interest is not from Australia.

People: W-League
Some what surprisingly, the people who list a location are not from Canberra. A possible explanation for this is that Sydney bebo users are friends or family of players, who themselves may not be from Canberra.

People: WNBL
Like the ANZ Championship, most fans are from areas near where the team is based. Fans also tend to be young and there is an even mix of male and female fans, which suggests that the WNBL could grow by working to attract that male audience in communities under served by NBL teams.

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I’m playing with Microsoft MapPoint. It is pretty awesome, except for the fact that some smaller cities don’t register. Anyway, I finished compiling the location of all fans of ANZ Champship teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones. Interest in this particular competition is small compared to the NRL, AFL and A-League. For a few people, fans didn’t list a city which makes getting an accurate idea of where fans are difficult. Two cities didn’t appear as they were really, really rural so they were excluded. I took this data and the output was the following map.

Australia Test by City 2 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Melbourne Vixens New South Wales Swifts (Sydney Swifts) Northern Mystics Southern Steel Sydney Swifts

The map has that limited perspective because there were no Queensland based fans. That includes people who just listed state, not city. The same situation existed for Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and Northern Territory.

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The New South Wales Swifts were originally the Sydney Swifts and part of the Commonwealth Bank Trophy.  When the event change and became the ANZ Championship and became more of a state versus state netball competition, the team’s name change.  The team names are used interchangably here depending on the original usage.

The team has been discussed in an earlier post about the size of the ANZ Championship community on Twitter.  This post will look into the specific community dedicated to the New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups.

There is one group dedicated to the Sydney Swifts on Yahoo!Groups.  It was created on May 16, 2001 and currently has 50 members.  The group has been neglected and been the subject of spam starting in 2005.  Prior to that, discussion on the list had ended in March 2002 (with the admin having deleted three spam e-mails in November 2003).  There were 84 legitimate posts to the list in this period.  Graphing it, the posting volume looks like:

This posting pattern is similar to that of the some of the less active AFL teams on Yahoo!Groups.  I joined the list to find out membership demographic information.  Only eleven of the current members joined when there was active posting to the list.  Ten people joined in the period with no posting, and the other 29 joined during periods of active spamming.   Of the 50, only four listed their demographic information.  When the list was active, the person who listed their age has 21, female and Australian.  After the period of active spam, the three people listing demographic information were all male and older.  Of the two who listed their country of residence, neither listed Australia.    (For the totals on Yahoo!Groups on my chart, this will listed at 50, despite the the fact that  only 21 or so are probably legitimately interested in the team.  At the moment, I do not have the time and ability to join every team related mailing list to determine who is and is not a legitimate poster based on join date.)

On LiveJournal, there are two people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Of the two, one updated a week ago, is 22 and from New South Wales.  The other has not updated in 162 weeks and does not list a country of residence.

There are four people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest on bebo and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Only one lists their age, 20.  The other three list their location and all are based i New South Wales.

The community on Twitter is the largest, with 90 people following the official team account.  Facebook, surprisingly, has no one listing the team as an interest.  Yahoo!Groups probably legitimately had the second largest following with 21 if we only count back in the day.  The fact that bebo and LiveJournal both have bigger interest than Facebook is also surprising.

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