Ozzie Sport

I’m still looking at the NBL and this time, I’m looking at people interested in the teams on Facebook.   Today, using the Create Ad page, I set the variables for all with the exception of the country.  That I set for Australia.  I got the following table:

NBL on Facebook

There aren’t any particular patterns here that can be readily explained such as higher interest in teams from non-major leagues existing outside of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales.  (Melbourne’s A-League team is first, with Adelaide in second, Sydney in third, Perth in fourth and Brisbane in fifth.)

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (November 7)

This post is similar to the one for the ANZ Championship where I went to Facebook, found all the relevant fanpages and groups for a team, got their member lists, identified the city or country that a network was based out of and then counted added those together. This collection of teams is much, much bigger with about 200 cities or so and Microsoft MapPoint didn’t do a very good job as it missed 119 cities when Cairns and the Gold Coast are excluded. This makes things a bit tricky when trying to determine the geographic distribution of the community on Facebook. (Added to that, Map Point doesn’t want to put Cairns and the Gold Coast on the same map.)

One thing to note before looking at this, I’ve again excluded non-Australian and non-Kiwi members. If I was doing work for these teams professionally though? I would really target international student populations at the major universities and at high schools where there are high school exchange students. It looks like these fans account for a fair amount of fans on Facebook. Once they leave Australia though, those fans begin to lose value as the chance to monetize them is much less effective. They can add numbers to official Facebook fan pages but they aren’t likely to generate revenue. If a team’s goal is to convert people into potential ticket buyers, this is a problem. (For leagues such as the NRL and AFL where there is an international television agreement, I’d advise them make occasional posts reminding their non-native audience how they can tune in, encourage them to demand that their local satellite and cable providers give them access to these games to watch.)

Onwards with maps…

NBL fandom by state 220 110 0 Adelaide 36ers Cairns Taipans Gold Coast Blaze Melbourne Tigers New Zealand Breakers Perth Wildcats South Melbourne Dragons Townsville Crocodiles Wollongong Hawks

NBL by city 70 8 1 Adelaide 36ers Melbourne Tigers New Zealand Breakers Perth Wildcats South Melbourne Dragons Townsville Crocodiles Wollongong Hawks

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)

bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones all have relatively small communities when compared to Facebook. It bothers me sometimes because to understand the size and shape of the online fan community on popular social networks almost requires looking at the site if I want to be accurate. The data you get from the advertising information is interesting but limited. Looking at fanpage and group membership is even more limited but at least you can get names and a better feel for location. I decided to do that for ANZ Championship teams. (There are just too many NRL and AFL and even NBL related groups for me to want to tackle at the moment.) I found the following list of groups and fan pages:

Some of these groups have as many as 1,000 members and some have as few as 13. I went looked at the membership list, found the people who belonged to specific networks, identified the location of that network and then created a map based on those. Some cases, like for corporations, have no city specific location and some of the schools on the list are affiliated with bigger towns near them. The map below differs a fair bit from the similar map for to the one for bebo, blogger and Facebook. The major difference? Regional fannishness is much, more more apparent on Facebook.

ANZ Championship on Facebook 40 6 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Canterbury Tactix Melbourne Vixens Northern Mystics Queensland Firebirds West Coast Fever

ANZ Championship on Facebook 40 6 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Canterbury Tactix Melbourne Vixens Northern Mystics Queensland Firebirds West Coast Fever

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• ANZ Championship fandom location on LiveJournal, bebo and blogger

When I was compiling the list of Twitter accounts for the ANZ Championship, I found several Australian netball team Twitter related accounts, including ones for Australian Diamonds, Petersham RUFC Netball Club, ACE Netball Club, Orcas Netball.  I got details regarding the total number of followers, checked totals on Facebook and compared these to the ANZ teams.  The following table was generated:

Australian Netball on Facebook and Twitter

For the smaller club teams that are more about participation, there just is not a Facebook interest in them.  This is not surprising as listing a team you participate in recreationally might seem odd; you’re not a fan but a player and the team isn’t professional or top level so it is unlikely others will want to find you as a result of your participation.  At least two of those teams have a Facebook presence to share news but this is not enough to get people to list these teams as an interest.

Beyond the clubs listed, there are some regional accounts for those interested in Australian netball.  They include @NetballAust – Netball Australia (72 followers), @Sydney_Netball – Sydney and New South Wales netball news from a newspaper (31 followers), and @netballvic – Netball Victoria (20 followers).

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

The ANZ Championship replaced the Commonwealth Bank Trophy as the premiere netball championship in 2008. There are ten teams in the competition, five from Australia and five from New Zealand.  They are:

• Adelaide Thunderbirds

• Melbourne Vixens

• New South Wales Swifts

• Queensland Firebirds

• West Coast Fever

• Canterbury Tactix

• Central Pulse

• Northern Mystics

• Southern Steel

• Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic

With the exception of the Melbourne Vixens, no one lists these teams as an interest on Facebook.  The New Zealand based teams also lack a fan base inside New Zealand’s Facebook community. The Melbourne Vixens have 840 people listing them as an interest on Facebook.  I’ve looked at some of the segmentation of this audience and generated the following data which can give you a better idea of the fanbase for this netball team that actually has a fanbase on Facebook, as determined by people listing them as an interest.

One of the things that surprised me in this little data set is that for fans aged 40 to 49, most of the fans are male.  I’m not sure why this is.  Female fans of the team also look to be overwhelming heterosexual.  For a female sports team, this does surprise me a bit as I would have thought that the percentage would have been a little higher.  The fanbase also appears to be a bit older: High school athletes do not appear as interested in the team, which suggests interest in the team may develop as fans get older and are less likely to participate in the sport themselves.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia

The Commonwealth Bank Trophy is the premiere competition in Australia for women’s netball.  The competition has ten teams.  They are:

• Adelaide Thunderbirds

• AIS Canberra Darters

• Hunter Jaegers

• Melbourne Kestrels

• Melbourne Phoenix

• Perth Orioles

• Queensland Firebirds

• Sydney Swifts

Given the popularity netball for women in Australia, with 389,400 women having participated in 2002, I would have suspected some interest in the premiere competition on Facebook.  Yet according to Facebook’s Advertising targeting, no one is interested in any of those teams.  This with 60,200 people interested in netball by Australians on Facebook.   Most of the fans are female: 53,920 or 89.5%.  Interest in Australia’s national netball team is at 1,580 with 1,360 being female.  This interest in the sport and in the national team just is not translating into interest in teams in the major competition.

Edited to add: My bad.  This competition came to an end in 2007.  While Facebook has some fans in defunct teams, two years later it isn’t that surprising that there are not people interested in these teams as Facebook penetration is Australia is slower than it was in the United States, where people may have listed interests years ago and never got around to updating them.

Related Posts:

• Facebook groups and fanpages redux
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

This is less a blog post and more almost a note to myself.  I was looking at the size of defunct National Rugby League teams on LiveJournal, its clones and Facebook.  One team I am looking at now is Cumberland.   This particular team lasted only eight games in the league that predated the National Rugby League.  Nonetheless, I checked them out because sometimes you get people who are less sports fans passionate about their teams performance now; you get people who love the history of older teams and the game in an earlier era.  In the United States (which is admittedly not Australia), there are people who love teams from the Negro League and All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.  Thus, it is conceivable that you might get people fan of a team like Cumberland.

I checked out all the LiveJournal clones to see if anyone listed Cumberland as an interest.  Nope.  None.  I checked Facebook.  Facebook says that there are less than 20 fans of Cumberland from Australia.  That makes sense.  The North Sydney Bears and the Balmain Tigers have people interested in them on Facebook.  (But not the Glebe Dirty Reds, Newtown Jets, Western Suburbs Magpies.)  Then I checked LiveJournal.  LiveJournal has 42 people who list Cumberland as an interest.  This number is not accurate.  A quick look at some of the people confirms it as Cumberland is a city in Pennsylvania and Iowa and Indiana and Main, in England, and in Canada.  It also is a well known CTA stop on Chicago’s El.  The number for LiveJournal thus goes down as a zero, despite the fact that it doesn’t quite line up with the actual total.

Edited to add: This also applies for University, a team active from 1920-1937 .

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Gold Coast Titans on bebo
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

I’ve not really spent much time looking for fan communities for Australian sports teams on Facebook.  This is for a couple of reasons.  First, the data from Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection is often subject to wild fluctuations in the course of small periods of time.  In the case of one search, there was a 200 person drop in ten minutes on a sample size of about 3,000.  That’s pretty significant and calls into  question all the data.  The second reason is that it is hard to get data out of Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection.  For LiveJournal, bebo and blogger, I might not be able to get all a user’s info but I have enough that I can easily tell you that the average Northern Territory fan of a team is this age.  I can identify specific individuals and in some cases make educated guesses about the reliability of the data.    With Facebook, all I get is a number based on the selection.  If I want to find out how many female fans there of the Brisbane Lions from Queensland, I have to make a number of selections to get that number.  (But I only get that based on city for Facebook, not state.)  If I want to find out how many male fans there are, I have to go back to Facebook and make another series of selections.  I can’t do that with in the context of my own data set compiled / exported from Facebook.  This makes it really impossible to compile a complete listing of data in a timely manner.  If I want to find out how many 18 year olds are fans of the Canberra Raiders, I have to make that selection one at a time.  Aggravating.

Still, I wanted an idea of what is going on with Australia’s sports fandom on Facebook in terms of location and demographics.  What I thus have is a load of random data.  (Random data is random.) I tended to focus on cities and teams, with both chosen mostly at random. I can’t find an easy way to display or map this so the table is located below for you to look at.

Before that, some things I found interesting in this data:

• Brisbane Roar’s male fans are double the amount of their female counter parts.
• Brisbane Roar fans also to be single with 420 married compared to 180 married.
• The Perth Wildcats don’t have a fanbase in the Northern Territory or Tasmania.
• Queensland Maroons have 40 fans in Rockhampton, Queensland compared to the 8,100 fans they have in Sydney.
• New Zealand’s Canterbury Crusaders have the same fan community size, 80, in Sydney as the do in Cranbourne.
• The Melbourne Vixens are the only netball team to be listed as an interest from the Tasman ANZ Championship teams.
• St. Kilda is more popular than the Sydney Swans in Adelaide.
• Essendon Bombers are more likely to be college graduates than currently in high school.  At least for those on Facebook.
• In the AFL, the Essendon Bombers are more popular than the Geelong Cats, Hawthorn Hawks, North Melbourne Kangaroos, Richmond Tigers, St. Kilda Saints, and Sydney Swans for all Australians on Facebook.
• The Adelaide Crows are more popular in Brisbane than in Perth.
• Between the Perth Wildcats, Parramatta Eels, St. Kilda Football Club, Penrith Panthers, South Sydney Rabbitohs , Sydney Swans, and Wests Tigers, the mot popular teams in Hobart is St. Kilda with the Sydney Swans coming in second and the Parramatta Eels coming in third.
• Darwin only has 4,360  people from the city on Facebook.  Between, Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks, Gold Coast Titans, Geelong Cats, Perth Wildcats, Hawthorn Hawks, Newcastle Knights, Parramatta Eels, St. Kilda Football Club,South Sydney Rabbitohs, and Wests Tigers, no teams has more than 20 fans in the city and the 50 mile area around it.
• In Perth, the Perth Wildcats are more popular than the Perth Glory.

Edited to add on January 9, 2010: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number.  In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240.  When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200.  This change will show up in any future data analysis.  The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 11)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 4)