Posts Tagged Brisbane Roar

Australian sports fandom on Facebook: Random data is random

Posted by Laura on Wednesday, 6 January, 2010

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:

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Category: Facebook View Comments

The A-League on Twitter

Posted by Laura on Tuesday, 5 January, 2010

There are ten leagues in Australia and New Zealands’s soccer A-League.  All teams have either an official or unofficial Twitter account.  In some cases, there are multiple accounts dedicated to a team.  Below is a list of some of the accounts sorted by team:

If you want to easily follow these accounts on Twitter, you can do so by following my ozziesport’s A-League list.    This list was compiled by looking at the A-League related lists on Twitter, finding where teams were listed.  It is an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible.
These Twitter accounts have various levels of activity.  Many are interactive, where the accounts reply to people or retweet others.  The interacting with followers seems to be more noticeable on fan run accounts.
The team with the most account dedicated to them is the Melbourne Victory, with five. Next is the Sydney FC with three.  After that, you have Adelaide United, Brisbane Roar and the Central Coast Mariners with two.  Last, you have Gold Coast United, New Castle Jets, North Queensland Fury FC, Perth Glory and the Wellington Phoenix with one account each.
The following chart shows the number of follows for each account sorted by total number of followers.  These numbers date to January 5, 2010.

When these numbers are correlated with the 2009-2010 average match attendance, a somewhat meaningful correlation of .405 is found.  This may suggest that interest in following the team on Twitter correlates to match attendance and that teams could and should focus on getting followers.  A much stronger correlation of .940 exists between the total number of Twitter accounts dedicated to the team and their attendance.  This appears to suggests that large attendance leads to an active and strong fan base for Australian soccer.

Related Posts:

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Category: A-League, Twitter View Comments

Brisbane’s sports community on LiveJournal and clones, bebo, blogger and Twitter

Posted by Laura on Tuesday, 5 January, 2010

This post is a series of posts looking at the size of Australian sports leagues on LiveJournal, its clones and other social networks. Earlier posts include Australian Football League on JournalFen , Australian Football League community on DeadJournal , National Rugby League on DeadJournal and JournalFen,  Australian Football League on LiveJournal clones like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios and InsaneJournal, Adelaide Crows community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger,and Official Australian Football League Twitter accounts and follower population by country. and Brisbane Lions community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger. Methodology for this post has been discussed in earlier posts.

Brisbane has a number of professional sports team including the Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Lions, Queensland Maroons, Brisbane Roar, Brisbane Bullets (defunct), Queensland Reds, Queensland Bulls, Queensland Blades, Queensland Firebirds, Queensland Rams and Queensland Sundevils.  For all but two of these teams, the Blades and Rams, there is some small community on one of the following social networks: bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones, Twitter.  If Twitter is excluded, the Broncos have the largest community with 333 people interested in them and the Sundevils the smallest with 1 person interested in them.

What does the Brisbane sports team fandom look like? Half (54%) the Australian community is based out of Queensland and about a quarter (28%) is based in New South Wales.  The rest is distributed amongst the other states, with the exception of Tasmania which has no Brisbane fans for any sports.

Map of Brisbane sports fandom by state and team

Rugby is traditionally more popular than footy in Queensland.   The distribution in Queensland suggests something a bit different, with 89 total fans for the Lions versus 83 for the Broncos.  Rugby and the Broncos are more popular only in New South Wales than footy and the Lions. One exception exists for the ACT where there are three fans for each.

Bearing in mind that people can be counted twice if they are one more than one network and are fans of more than one team, Brisbane sports fandom where the Australian state is known has the the largest interest base on bebo, with 272 people using it.  Next is LiveJournal with 62 users, Blogger with 20, Blurty with 2 and InsaneJournal with 1.  Brisbane fans in the ACT are more likely to use LiveJournal (3) with bebo (2) and blogger (2) being their next most popular choices.  Victorian fans of Brisbane teams just prefer bebo (11) to LiveJournal (10) with their third choice being blogger. (2)  In all other cases, bebo is the top choice in every state for Brisbane sports fans.  Outside of Queensland, no other fans use or used blurty or InsaneJournal.

There is an international interest in Brisbane sports teams.  This ranges from 0 to 50% of the total community that lists their country of origin.  Communities with 50% of their support base outside Australia include the Queensland Red community on bebo, and the Brisbane Roar community on bebo.  In both these cases, the community is 4 and 2 people respectively.  33.3% of the 30 member strong Queensland Maroons community on bebo comes from outside Australia, with 8 people from New Zealand and 2 from the Cook Islands. 32.4% of the Twitter followers of the Brisbane Broncos are from outside Australia with 13 from China, 68 from Great Britain and 286 from the United States. 28.9% of the Brisbane Broncos on bebo comes outside Australia with 32 people from New Zealand, 10 from Papau New Guinea, 6 from the United States, 2 from Fiji, the Philippines and Tonga.   The Queensland Reds unofficial Twitter follow list has 28.6% of its followers from outside the US. 50 followers are the US, 36 from Great Britain, 9 from Brazil and New Zealand, and 4 from Denmark and Italy.

bebo, Blogger and LiveJournal all allow users to display their age on their profiles.   This can help develop a picture of the age of the a team’s community online.  There is a small problem in that not everyone lists their age and these populations are very, very small.  Thus, this data cannot be really used to extrapolate beyond the specific community unless there is some other evidence to support that.

For the Brisbane Broncos community on blogger, the average age is 33, median is 31, mode is 20 with 9 of 12 people listing their ages.  This is not close to LiveJournal’s Broncos community which has an average age of 25, median age of 27 and mode age of 20 with 13 of 42 people listing their age.  The bebo community is much younger than both with an average age of 23, median age of 20 and mode age of 19 with 127 of 278 people listing their age.  For the lions, 49 people list their page on bebo with an average age of 24.5, median age of 21, mode age of 18.  On blogger, 10 Lions fans list their age.  They have a average ago of 33, median age of 30 and mode age of 27.  For LiveJournal Lions fans,  17 list their age.  They have an average age of 26, and a median and mode age of 24.  Only one other group, Queensland Maroons on bebo, have more than 10 fans who list their ages.  In that group, 21 list their ages, with an average age of 21.9, median age of 20 and mode age of 20.

Bebo and blogger both allow users to publicly display their gender.  The team and network with the highest percentage of male fans involves the Queensland Reds on bebo, where all six individuals list their gender as male.  The next highest percentage of male in the community include the Brisbane Bulls on bebo and the Queensland Bulls on bebo.  In both cases, the percentage of males is 60%.  In the case of the Brisbane Bulls,  40% or 2 people do not list a gender.  For the Queensland Bulls,  20% or one person lists identifies as female and the other did not list a gender.  The highest percentage of female members is the Queensland Bulls on blogger with 50% but that community only has two members.  The next highest percentage is for the Brisbane Broncos community on blogger at 42% or five people identifying as female.  All other members of that community identify as male.   The Brisbane Lions community on blogger has a female percentage at 38, with 6 people identifying as female.  56% of the members identify as male and 6%, or one person, do not list a gender.  The highest percentage of unknown/unlisted gender is for the Queensland Sundevils bebo community, which only has one person and they don’t identify their gender.  After that is the Brisbane Roar community on bebo, where 69% or 11 people do not identify their gender, 4 people identify as male and 1 identifies as female.  The Brisbane Lions community on bebo has 40% unknown/unlisted with 53 people not including their gender. 36% of the Lions bebo community identifies as male and 24% identifies as female.

This isn’t the best write up, mostly just summarizing some of the data.    The rest of the data used for this post will show up in future posts.  As I learn more, I’m planning on integrating more analysis of what this data means.

Related Posts:

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Category: Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Lions, LiveJournal, bebo, blogger View Comments
Newer Entries »