Ozzie Sport

I haven’t done an update in a month or so… but this is my list of Australian clubs, leagues and athletes on Twitter.  It is sorted by followers.  The list is rather comprehensive but not all comprehensive.  A few accounts have been deleted since the last time I did this.  Those accounts aren’t noted this time around. And unlike the last time around, I haven’t htmled the Twitter accounts.  If you see any people or clubs or fansites that I’m missing, let me know in the comments.

One of the comments included links to several Australian athletes on Twitter that I had missed. Some of these athletes aren’t active in Australian leagues so they don’t necessarily really fit well with most of the people and leagues on the list… but included below for interest. Any more names of people, leagues and clubs I’m missing, let me know.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter
• 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)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (version 2)

This post is basically an update of Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers. I haven’t actively sought to improve or update the accounts included on this list though there are a few new accounts.  A few accounts have been deleted and one has been suspended, LanceFranklin. Deleted and suspended accounts have been marked with a 0 for total number of followers.

This data was gathered on May 30, 2010.  It includes non-Australian teams that compete in Australian based leagues.  It also contains Australian some athlete accounts where the athlete competes for a club in an Australian based league.

Related Posts:

• 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)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (version 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)

Yesterday, I made a post about the most popular Australian athlete, league and team related Twitter accounts.

On Twitter, @anthonyalsop pointed me to a list of Australian athletes on Twitter he had created.  I had missed quite a few on his list and some of those accounts led me to lists where I found additional athletes, teams and leagues.  All told, I added about 61 new rows of data.  There are a few repeats from yesterday’s list as I updated some numbers.  (Historical twitter growth for athletes would be interesting to look at and there are tools for just that.  It is a project for a different day. Maybe.)  There doesn’t appear to be much change.

Things to remember with this list: It does not include athletes who do not play for team based sports.  Swimmers, golfers, tennis players, surfers and race car drivers are not on the list.  It also does not include Australian athletes playing for teams outside of Australia.  This includes cyclists (who are probably the most popular Australian athletes that I can find) as they often compete for teams outside Australia.  It does not include Australian NBA and WNBA players.  It also does not include retired Australian athletes, unless they are now involved in a management role with a specific team.  National teams are included but players are generally sorted by their other playing affiliation. This list does include athletes and teams from outside Australia when the league has teams from other countries.  Thus, South Africa is represented with its Super 14 teams and New Zealand is included with a variety of teams in leagues such as the NRL, Super 14 and the NBL.

Updated this list on the 11th to include the Australian Opals thanks to a comment by @SportingSheilas.

Related Posts:

• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

An updated version of this list can be found at Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.

This is sorted by total number of followers. If an account is tagged (unofficial), it indicates that it is not the official account; it belongs to management, a player or a fansite.  The list includes teams from most of the major sports leagues in Australia.  Teams that play in those leagues that are not from Australia have also been included.  Players were only counted as belonging to a team if they currently play for it.  (Some players that are on NRL player lists have gone to play in Europe.  They aren’t included.)  The date that the information was collected is also included as these numbers actively change over time.  If some one/team/organization is listed twice, it is because the data was collected on multiple dates.

Related Posts:

• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• 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 clubs and teams on Twitter

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.

Related Posts:

• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups
• ANZ Championship on Facebook
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

I’m going through my data to make sure I can easily find everything by league and city.  Back on January 3, I collected data for the Perth Heat community on bebo and found 27 people who were interested in the team.  If you are an Australian and don’t know who the Perth Heat are, that is understandable.  The Perth based team competes in the Claxton Shield, Australia’s premiere baseball competition.  The competition is a successor to the defunct Australian Baseball League.

Of the 27 people, 15 are female (56%), 11 are male (41%) and 1 does not list a gender (3%).  This 50% female is unique on bebo, with the only other teams looked at so far having that percentage are the female New South Wales Swifts and Central Pulse.  I don’t know enough about baseball in Australia to know why this is so.  I might speculate that the bebo fans may be women related to or involved with men playing on the team.  For Australian rules football in the United States, where the game is not a major one, a lot of the attendees and people interested in teams like the Chicago United, many of the fans are female and connected to the team in some way.  That could account for it.  It may also be something like American expats could be more female and looking for a local team to cheer for that reminds them of home.

The average age of the 19 fans who list their age is 26.5, median age is 27 and mode age is 29.  Fans of the team aren’t that old and look a bit older than some other communities on bebo.

The Perth Heat have an international fanbase on bebo and Twitter:

When I originally did the Twitter table, I thought shenanigans were at play because of the large number of international fans.  Given the bebo data, that Twitter data does not look as questionable.

On bebo,7 Australians identify their state of residence.  (Or it can be easily figured out based on the city they live in.)  Six are in Western Australia and one is in Tasmania.  The Tasmanian is a bit surprising but otherwise, a regional team has a regional audience.  Seems pretty logical.

Of all the networks looked at so far, the largest fanbase for this team is on Facebook with 800, then Twitter with 35 and bebo with 27.  The other services like blogger, LiveJournal and its clones have no other fans.  Bebo’s community is thus the smallest of the existing communities, but also the one with the most easily accessible demographic data.

Related Posts:

• New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups
• Claxton Shield on Twitter
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

The Central Pulse are a New Zealand based team in the Australian/New Zealand based ANZ Championship, the premiere netball competition in both countries.  Because the presence of Australian teams, it is being covered by this blog.

There is a small community of people listing the team as an interest on bebo.  It consists of four people.  Of these four, all are from New Zealand and all are female.  These two are not surprising given that this a female athletic team and the team is based in New Zealand.

The average and mean age of the three fans listing their age is 21.6 and 21 respectively.  This sample of three is the largest of all the other teams looked at on social networks so far.  With samples of one, the New South Wales Swifts community on LiveJournal, and the Melbourne Phoenix on blogger are both older at 22 and 32.  With samples of one, Adelaide Thunderbirds on bebo, and New South Wales Swifts on bebo are younger at 18 and 20.

Considering the population size of Australia compared to New Zealand, the most surprising thing about this bebo data is that the community is so big at 4 compared to Australian teams with 1.

Related Posts:

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

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.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location

I’ve spent the past two hours or so culling through various netball related Twitter lists, checking lists that included ANZ Championship teams and players.  After having done that, it looks like five teams have a Twitter presence:  Adelaide Thunderbirds, Melbourne Vixens, New South Wales Swifts, Queensland Firebirds, and West Coast Fever.  For the Thunderbirds, there are two accounts: @AdelaideTBirds and @NatTbirds.  The first is a team account and the second is the personal account of a player.  The Vixens similarly have two accounts, one for the team and a player with a personal account: @MelbourneVixens and @SharelleVixens.  The same situation exists for the New South Wales Swifts: @nswswifts and @SusanSwifts.  For the Queensland Firebirds and West Coast Fever, single players have accounts but the teams do not appear to have an official Twitter presence: @laurafirebirds and @SusanWCFever.

For the team accounts, the Thunderbirds have 62 followers, the Vixens have 904 followers and the Swifts have 90 followers.  This puts the average at 352 followers per team because the 904 skews the numbers really high.  If that is excluded, the average is 76.  For player accounts, the average number of followers is 208.8.  The highest number is 400, for the Vixens player.  The lowest is 66 for the West Coast Fever player.  These numbers are comparable to several of the A-League related Twitter accounts.

Using Twitter Analyzer, the location of the followers of these accounts was determined and the following table was generated:

ANZ Championship on Twitter

The West Coast Fever (represented by their Tweeting player) had the smallest Australian audience and the Melbourne Vixens had the largest percentage Australian audience.  I still believe these numbers are questionably reliable, that people are lying about their location of that there is a huge problem with spam followers on Twitter.  Why?  The Melbourne Vixens have 9 followers from Greenland.   Googling for Greenland and Netball doesn’t bring up any information about sport in the country.  Given that, it doesn’t make sense that the Vixens would have that huge of a following from the country.

If you’re interested in following ANZ Championship teams and players on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list @ozziesport/anzchampionship.

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 female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

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