Archive for category Wests Tigers

Most popular NRL related Twitter accounts (November 18)

Posted by Laura on Thursday, 18 November, 2010

I wasn’t intending to run this again until tomorrow.  Things came up.  I’m going away for the weekend and I want to get everyone’s follower information to see if I can’t begin to map that again.  Also, it’s been a month since I last that information.  (It took about five days.  That was back when Shane Warne had only 198,000 followers.)  I like benchmarking that data to see if there are geographic shifts in where people follow are from.  (How did the Monaghan story affect the Raiders fanbase?)  So yeah, I figured I would run the script this morning instead of a week from now.

This particular list only includes NRL related accounts. (And everyone on it appears on the list of most popular for all of Australia.)   I’m hoping all the labels are right.  If anything is incorrect, players switched team, I’m missing people… let me know and I’ll fix it.  And yeah, I’ve ranked this one so you can more easily see who is popular and who is not.  Finding Twitter lists related to the NRL has been rather hard so I’m less certain that this is complete than I am regarding the list for the AFL.

Rank Account League Team Description Followers Statuses Listed Friends
1 LoteTuqiri NRL Wests Tigers player 14852 4517 591 83
2 RealBigDell NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons unofficial 11811 6244 337 212
3 SamBurgess8 NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs player 10703 2199 231 116
4 NRL NRL NRL 10057 5313 323 52
5 jarrydhayne_1 NRL Parramatta Eels player 9943 1670 207 131
6 mat_rogers6 NRL Gold Coast Titans unofficial 7743 2554 323 149
7 robbiefarah NRL Wests Tigers player 5356 795 106 39
8 NathanHiney NRL Parramatta Eels player 4853 86 124 12
9 scottprince7 NRL Gold Coast Titans player 4746 676 96 102
10 markMGgeyer NRL Penrith Panthers former player 4519 917 194 108
11 The_Man_Mundine NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons former player 4470 765 73 60
12 brisbanebroncos NRL Brisbane Broncos official team (male) 4183 1317 162 4
13 BrettHodgson NRL Sydney Roosters player (male) 3667 1706 88 104
14 BENJI_MARSHALL6 NRL Wests Tigers player 3636 123 72 56
15 GCTitans NRL Gold Coast Titans 3578 478 146 24
16 TheFootyShowNRL NRL NRL television show 3325 163 82 87
17 tim_mannah NRL Parramatta Eels player 3194 266 78 65
18 nzwarriors NRL New Zealand Warriors (Auckland Warriors) unofficial 2968 259 92 377
19 bigjstevens NRL Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks former player 2935 743 77 70
20 Wests_Tigers NRL Wests Tigers official 2876 714 109 820
21 MelbStormRLC NRL Melbourne Storm official 2591 793 132 2097
22 SSFCRABBITOHS NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs 2456 1615 130 1035
23 MarioFenech NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs former player (male) 2385 879 69 5
24 TripleM_NRL NRL NRL radio (male) 2182 1893 102 66
25 manlyseaeagles NRL Manly Sea Eagles 2035 1003 107 1973
26 M_Jennings_03 NRL Penrith Panthers player 1993 53 55 9
27 benross23 NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs unofficial 1825 1127 74 68
28 TheParraEels NRL Parramatta Eels fansite (male) 1783 357 53 20
29 NRLNEWS NRL NRL unofficial 1722 4333 49 492
30 iam_chriswalker NRL Gold Coast Titans former player (male) 1721 1746 96 51
31 FOXSPORTSAU_NRL NRL NRL news site 1720 2531 64 6
32 NRL_Dragons NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons official team (male) 1611 733 74 140
33 penrithpanthers NRL Penrith Panthers unofficial 1584 1360 91 88
34 NRL_Bulldogs NRL Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs official team (male) 1366 1230 42 83
35 kevin_gordon1 NRL Gold Coast Titans player 1328 41 38 19
36 EricGrotheJnr NRL Parramatta Eels player 1295 35 28 3
37 therabbitohs NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs official 1285 219 77 10
38 DarrenLockyer NRL Brisbane Broncos player (male) 1209 15 27 12
39 NRLTweet NRL NRL unofficial 1203 7493 65 229
40 gorgeousgrose NRL Manly Sea Eagles unofficial 1179 494 59 75
41 therealsteavis NRL NRL journalist (male) (TripleM) 1158 3253 65 1050
42 RaidersCanberra NRL Canberra Raiders 1123 212 84 6
43 parramatta_eels NRL Parramatta Eels 1105 17 40 1070
44 wolfmanwilliams NRL Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles player 1043 66 27 30
45 lukeodwyer NRL Gold Coast Titans unofficial 1029 795 63 71
46 PirtekParraEels NRL Parramatta Eels unofficial 1014 57 60 7
47 AshHarrison1 NRL Gold Coast Titans unofficial 1004 216 56 25
48 MelbourneStorm_ NRL Melbourne Storm unofficial 1000 14 37 12
49 rabbitohs NRL South Sydney Rabbitohs unofficial 981 1299 46 718
50 Clintontoopi NRL Gold Coast Titans player 952 231 31 27
51 thenzwarriors NRL New Zealand Warriors (Auckland Warriors) 907 200 67 72
52 Cronulla_Sharks NRL Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks official team (male) 864 405 66 55
53 robbieodavis1 NRL Newcastle Knights former player (male) 803 255 59 205
54 DanGinnane_MMM NRL NRL journalist (male) (TripleM) 788 1359 29 148
55 leaguescores NRL NRL fansite (male) 781 11245 48 342
56 TWiLeague NRL NRL show 746 2444 44 1486
57 TripleM_NRLlive NRL NRL radio (male) 720 948 30 1
58 RugbyLeagueFeed NRL NRL fansite 702 7851 37 211
59 Fergo1990 NRL Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks unofficial 561 47 31 15
60 PlanetEels NRL Parramatta Eels unofficial 554 2863 33 605
61 rleaguecom NRL NRL 540 4402 36 3
62 fakebrycegibbs NRL Wests Tigers unofficial 534 457 24 382
63 bigleaguemag NRL NRL 528 437 26 147
64 deadsetlegends NRL NRL journalist (male) (TripleM) 494 247 26 8
65 terrycampese NRL Canberra Raiders player (male) 487 63 37 8
66 broncosbigfan NRL Brisbane Broncos unofficial 473 971 31 511
67 nrlfanclub NRL NRL fansite 456 1931 28 365
68 NewyKnights NRL Newcastle Knights 454 186 19 584
69 mighty_dragons NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons unofficial 393 3 17 7
70 nthqldcowboys NRL North Queensland Cowboys 368 474 28 28
71 wade_graham NRL Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks player (male) 368 6 19 2
72 NRLlivebetting NRL NRL unofficial 364 1959 5 18
73 goldcoasttitans NRL Gold Coast Titans fansite (male) 350 1 6 7
74 Bulldogs_FC NRL Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs fansite 341 314 19 7
75 FootyBoys NRL NRL fansite (male) 337 2034 13 166
76 lone_scout NRL NRL NRL Dream Team (male) 318 202 11 1
77 joe_tomane29 NRL Gold Coast Titans player 281 184 6 33
78 1eyedeel NRL Parramatta Eels unofficial 251 1872 16 635
79 jsaffy NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons unofficial 244 9 23 11
80 GirlsLikeLeague NRL NRL fansite (female) 236 533 15 156
81 bulldogsnews NRL Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs unofficial 226 828 8 122
82 newtownrlfc NSWRL Newtown Jets official team (male) 214 611 19 0
83 tigers1908 NRL Balmain Tigers unofficial 208 75 14 7
84 DragonsRedV NRL St. George Illawarra Dragons fansite 203 0 16 0
85 CCBEARS NSWRL Central Coast Bears official team (male) 191 36 14 63
86 NRLKnights NRL Newcastle Knights 169 132 6 0
87 TitaniumBar NRL Gold Coast Titans 153 392 7 26
88 Aaron_Cannings NRL Gold Coast Titans unofficial 139 1 15 3
89 BennyGalea NRL Wests Tigers former player (now with Hull KR) 130 14 2 34
90 womeninleague NRL NRL 120 50 10 15
91 welovetheshire NRL Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks fansite 103 8 7 362
92 oldie90 NRL Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles player (male) 92 305 6 35
93 RL1908 NRL NRL Rugby league historian/writer 89 94 4 111
94 Eelguts NRL Parramatta Eels radio commentator (male) 87 210 4 187
95 nrlthoughts NRL NRL fansite 59 120 1 217
96 parraeels NRL Parramatta Eels unofficial 44 4 4 0
97 ChaseNRL NRL NRL journalist 41 116 4 65
98 sidelinedNRL NRL NRL fansite 24 64 4 8
99 WWWraidersNETau NRL Canberra Raiders fansite 16 1390 0 1
100 raba NSWRL Central Coast Bears fansite (male) 4 0 1 0
101 blueandgoldarmy NRL Parramatta Eels unofficial 0 0 0 0

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Canberra and the Raiders on Twitter and Facebook

Posted by Laura on Wednesday, 15 September, 2010

Friday, the Canberra Raiders are playing the Wests Tigers in one of the playoff games in the NRL Finals. Canberrans are finally beginning to get really excited. A fair amount of this excitement is going on online. This post contains various insights into who Canberra Raiders fans are online and what they are doing. Given the time crunch, I’m only looking at Twitter and Facebook. If I have the time, I will add another post about both teams and their fans on other networks.

There is a lot of discussion about the Canberra Raiders taking place on Twitter. Not all of it is by Raiders fans. (RealBigDell of the Dragons is cheering for the Wests Tigers against the Raiders: twitter.com/RealBigDell/24269333344. ) So where are people Tweeting about the Raiders from? There are two really good tools for trying to figure this out. One is tribalytic.com and the other is Searchtastic.

tribalytic.com is Australian based allows you to search for a term and then can give you a break down by state, by klout and by wordcloud. This is an example of their results for the Canberra Raiders. According to tribalytic.com, in the period between August 14 and September 14, there were 298 tweets by 142 users that mentioned the Canberra Raiders. Of these tweets, 75 were from New South Wales, 32 were from the ACT, 25 were from Queensland and 4 from Victoria. Locals were just not chatting about the Raiders like those pesky New South Wales Rugby League obsessed people.

Searchtastic is a Twitter search engine that allows results to be exported to Excel. The Excel export includes profile information about the person who Tweeted. It sadly doesn’t pull up all search results for every tweet ever made on a subject. My experience is that it tends to pull up the 50 most recent. On the night of September 14 and the morning of September 15, I did a number of Raiders related searches, exported the results to Excel, combined all the tweets and removed the duplicates. I was left with a list of 443 unique tweets. (Some of these 443 were removed after it was determined that content wise, they had nothing to do with the Canberra Raiders. The total was brought down to 438.) (46 of these tweets date from between November 2009 and August 2010. The rest are from September 1, 2010 and after.) After this, using the location field, I figured out where those tweets originated from. 181 of the remaining Tweets were from an identifiable Australian state. 105 were from New South Wales, 53 from the ACT, 18 from Queensland and 5 from Victoria.

The ratio between New South Wales based Raiders Tweets and ACT based Tweets is 2.3 on Tribalytic and 1.9 on Searchtastic. The two are pretty close and suggest that people in the New South Wales are twice as likely to tweet about the Raiders as people in the ACT. We Canberrans just don’t Tweet about our team as much as outsiders do.

As a random point of fact, there were 22 people from the ACT who tweeted about the Raiders. The average person from the ACT who tweeted about the Raiders from the Searchtastic sample? They follow an average of 281 people, median of 91 and mode of 22. They are followed by an average of 222 people, median of 83. They have made an average of 1,346 total tweets, median of 718. The most “popular” person tweeting about the Raiders is @markparton with 1,632 followers. He is followed closely by @abcnewsCanberra who has 1,611 followers. (The contrast between the two is huge. @markparton follows 1,843 people. @abcnewsCanberra follows 0.)

The Tweeting habits of those New South Wales Raiders tweets? There are 58 of them. They are very different than your Canberran tweets. They have on average 1,335 followers, follow an average of 324.7 people and have made an average of 4,440.3 Tweets. Canberrans look much less active and less popular in comparison.

Another way of looking at location on Twitter is to see where people who follow the team are from. I’m interested in finding out if Canberrans support their local side or if, in this particular Finals game, Canberrans actually support the opposition, Wests Tigers. Following is an active way of showing support and sentiment is likely to be positive. Otherwise, why follow the team? The over representation of the NSW based tweets could be explained away as most of the competition in the NRL is based there; fans of other teams are likely to mention the team they are playing against. Added to that, the population base which NSW based teams draw from is much bigger.

To find out ACT based Twitter loyalty to the Raiders and Wests Tigers, I got the profile information for everyone following @RaidersCanberra and @Wests_Tigers. These accounts are the official accounts for the teams. The Raiders have 870 followers compared to the Wests Tigers 2,305 followers.

Of the Wests Tigers followers, only 25 or 1% of their followers are from Canberra. And by Canberra, I mean Canberra. None of the Wests Tigers followers from the ACT put information in their location that could identify what suburb they are from. This contrasts to the Canberra Raiders where 137 or 15.7% are from the ACT. 9 of those 137 list an identifiable suburb: 1 from Belconnen, 1 from Bruce, 1 from Conder, 1 from Fyschwick, 1 from Gungahlin, 1 from Phillip, 1 from Stirling and 2 from Tuggeranong. On Twitter, Canberrans are much more likely to follow the Raiders than the opposition. So while we might not be Tweeting about our team, we are following them.

Sadly, we just don’t appear to be following our team like New South Wales people follow our team. Where there are 137 from the ACT following the Raiders, there are 198 from New South Wales. That accounts for 24.6% of all Raiders followers. Those New South Wales people Tweet more about our team and they follow our team more than we do.

Wests Tigers fans also appear to be more from the state is based than the Raiders: 35.6% of Wests Tigers followers are from New South Wales. Our 24.6% doesn’t appear as impressive.

Focusing on New South Wales is not turning out to be fun. Indicators seem to suggest that they tweet more than Canberrans do and are more likely to follow the home team.

Let’s take a brief look at our Canberran based followers of both the Wests Tigers and the Canberra Raiders. These two groups are not similar in their Twitter usage patterns. Raiders fans have an average of 130.8 followers compared to 48.2 for the Wests Tigers. Canberra Raiders fans from the ACT update more often: 662.7 average updates compared to 104.8 for Canberran based West Tigers followers. Raiders fans have more friends with 199.2 people they follow on average. This compares to ACT based West Tigers followers who have an average of 121.2 people they follow. Canberrans Raiders fans are more likely to appear on lists, appearing on an average of 6.8 lists. ACT based West Tigers fans? On average only 1.2 lists. The indicators are that our Raiders fans are much more engaged with Twitter.

For Australian professional sport on Twitter, there appears to be a pattern for showing team support or interest in a team by following three hashtag patterns. They are #goTEAMMASCOT, #TEAMNAME, #LEAGUETEAMTEAM. This method of tagging was mostly pushed by AFL teams. The NRL appears to have embraced it less. (This is largely a result of different levels of engagement. On the whole, AFL teams engage more. NRL teams are more likely to use their official Twitter account as a place to export their RSS feeds. The AFL has official game tags. The NRL does not.) Still, some fans have followed the formula to make it worth looking at. For the Canberra Raiders, two standard hashtags appear to be used the most frequently: #canberraraiders and #goraiders. (The still aren’t used all that frequently. Tribalytic’s #NRL data says that for the September 1 to September 14, Canberra was mentioned in 9.42% of all tweets tagged with #nrl. No Raiders related hash tags are on the top 50 list of words used.) The #goraiders tag is problematic during the finals season: This hashtag is shared with fans of the Oakland Raiders. The data on tribalytic suggests it isn’t used period but looking through TwapperKeeper, there are Canberra Raiders references in there made by myself and CountryRL. In any case, this tag isn’t as popular as #canberraraiders. Since September 10, there have been at least 24 Tweets using this tag. The most popular user of this tag since that date is @KayLaYvette, who has used it 13 times. Beyond that, 3 others used it twice. 5 others have used it once. People using this hash tag aren’t using it to post links. Twitter said that 25% of all Tweets contained links. For this hashtag, only 12.5% of tweets contained a url. 67% of Tweets with the #canberraraiders hashtag also included the #NRL hashtag. Raiders fans don’t appear to be using this Tweet when chatting with eachother on Twitter as there aren’t any interactions associated with it. That theme mentioned earlier about how people outside Canberra were dominating as fans? Of the 24 posts using this hashtag, 9 were geotagged. The geotag didn’t originate in Canberra. Rather, the geotags put the tweeter in England. Poor Raiders.

That’s enough of Twitter. (I’m avoiding the temptation to do sentiment analysis.) Let’s move on to Facebook. Facebook has fewer tools than Twitter and some of the data is much harder to access than Twitter data. Thus, the level of analysis is less.

The first question is how many Canberra Raiders are there on Facebook in Australia? Facebook says 7,860. Of these, 1,180 are in the ACT and 4,340 are in New South Wales. In comparison, there are 29,380 Wests Tigers fans on Facebook in Australia. 480 are from the ACT and 19,980 are from New South Wales. Like Twitter, if you’re in Canberra, you’re more likely to support the home team. Also like Twitter, New South Wales Raiders fans outnumber fans in Canberra.

11,780 of the Wests Tigers fans are female. 2,180 of the Raiders fans are female. The Wests Tigers have a lot more female supporters (40.1%) than we Raiders fans do (27.8%). This isn’t bad news. This is good news. At the grounds, Raiders fans should be able to be louder and really bring in that home field advantage. Long term, also great news: The Raiders have a great opportunity to grow their fan base. The Wests Tigers don’t have that as they have a much more gender equal fan base.

1,080 of Canberra Raiders fans on Facebook are college graduates. 2,840 of West Tigers fans are college graduates. Here, Canberra is better, where better is defined by having a college education: 13.7% to 10.7%.

How welcoming are both teams to the GLBT community? 500 Wests Tigers fans identify as women interest in women and 100 Wests Tigers fans identify as men interest in men. The Canberra Raiders have 120 fans who identify as women interested in women and 40 fans who identify as men interested in men. Using this measure, both teams are about equal: 2% of their fanbase are gays, lesbians or bisexuals.

The official Wests Tigers fan page can be found at www.facebook.com/WestsTigers.com.au and the Canberra Raiders page can be found at www.facebook.com/Canberra-Raiders. The total number of likes and comments were recorded for the 25 most recent official posts on the feed. For the Raiders, that takes posts back to August 21. For the Tigers, this takes them back to July 1. (The Raiders appear to be much better at updating their Facebook page. The Tigers are importing their posts through their RSS feed, which is itself imported through Facebook. The Raiders in contrast post almost nothing through an RSS feed to their Facebook page.) On average, the Canberra Raiders get 22.75 likes per post and 17.04 comments per post. The Tigers in contrast get 30.54 likes per post and 32.16 comments per post. This looks like a win for the passion of West Tigers fans, except for the fact that 23,391 people like the Wests Tigers page and 1,710 people like the Canberra Raiders page. On average, 1.33% of Raiders fans like a post and 1.00% respond to a post. For the Wests Tigers, an average of 0.13% like a post and 0.14% comment on a post. Clearly Raiders fans are much more willing to interact with the club. Go Raiders fans. This is clearly the platform where we’re engaging with the team. (It is probably helped by the fact that the club is engaging back. This isn’t the case for either on Twitter.)

In conclusion, the Raiders fanbase appears to be contain more people from outside the territory than in. The community on Facebook and Twitter is smaller than that of the Wests Tigers. The Raiders do have a larger fanbase in Canberra and the ACT than the Wests Tigers have. While our fan base might be smaller, we are more likely to engage with the team on a percentage basis than Wests Tigers fans are. The reasons for some of the numbers on both fandom sides have to do with how the Raiders and Tigers chose to engage with their fanbase online. If anyone changed their strategy to be even more interactive, their fan base could kick the other one’s butt in terms of expressing their passion for the team.

Most of the raw data referenced in this post can be found at csv.ozziesport.com/.

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Wests Tigers on blogger

Posted by Laura on Thursday, 14 January, 2010

This post looks at the size of the Wests Tigers community on blogger.  The Wests Tigers are a Sydney based National Rugby League team.  The team is relatively new, having been founded in 2000 as a merger of the Balmain Tigers and the Western Suburbs Magpies.

So far, the only other NRL team on blogger that has been looked at is the Brisbane Broncos.  That team has 12 people who listed them as an interest.  In comparison, the Wests Tigers have ten people who list them as an interest.  That they are so close is a bit surprising as Roy Morgan Research indicates that the fanbase for the Wests Tigers is substantially smaller than that of the Broncos.

Of the ten West Tigers fans, seven are from Australia, one from New Zealand, one from the United Kingdom and one who does not identify their country of origin.  Compared to other NRL teams, the percentage of Australians is low: 100% of Brisbane Broncos fans on blogger and Dreamwidth are all Australian, 100% of Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal are Australians, 85.7% of Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal are Australian, 81.1% of Broncos fans on LiveJournal are Australian.  Of the networks and teams sampled, only the Broncos community on bebo has a smaller percentage, 71.1%, of Australians.

Of the Australians, three are from Queensland and three are from New South Wales.  This makes as these states are strong holds of Rugby League.  Added to that, Melbourne and Sydney have traditionally had a rivalry so you wouldn’t necessary expect a Victorian fan population.

The astrological sign data is really interesting and would be more interesting if it the samples were larger to see if some sort of statement could be made about a team’s fanbase.  That said, six people list their date of birth for Blogger to calculate their astrological sign.  Three are Leos, and with one person being a Cancer, Capricorn and Pisces.

Seven of the ten fans list their age, with two of these being obviously incorrect; a person cannot be 253 years old.   If those two are ignored, the average age of a Wests Tigers fan on blogger is 28.8 and a median age of 22.  This average makes the team’s fans older than some of the other NRL team fans on networks that I’ve looked at including Broncos fans on bebo and LiveJournal,  Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal and Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal.  The only team and network with a higher average is the Broncos community on blogger.  The above average age compared to other fan populations may end up being a result of people self selecting networks based on age: the youngest fans prefer bebo, fans in their mid 20s prefer LiveJournal and older fans prefer blogging.  As we age or as a result of a generational gap, we might prefer going from shorter method of communicating to a longer one.

Seven people list their gender as male, two as female and one does not identify their gender.  This is higher percentage of male fans than  the Broncos on either bebo or blogger.

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