By Paul Nicholson
April 9 – The trends of the previous six weeks were followed last week with no change in the Insideworldfootball table of Premier League club Twitter followers. Manchester United again surged forward to continue their standout gains against their rivals as they chase the total number of followers to overtake Arsenal and Chelsea who head them in the overall table.
The drop off in growth for Manchester City will be causing concern as the gap between the two clubs is widening each week. With the scale of investment City have been putting into the club brand, the barometer of success that Twitter provides through the growth numbers questions the bigger picture of how far they can realistically challenge Man Utd as a global brand.
Rather than clubs narrowing the gap in Man Utd in terms of weekly gains, the gaps are widening. The trend chart shows the top six teams with over 1 million followers all showing a steady growth but in particular Man Utd having accelerated growth over all the rest, especially in the past two weeks.
The last two weeks have seen Man City’s season start to fizzle out with losses in th league to teams they would expect to beat. At the same time Man Utd have jumped over the Premier League champions in the race for Champions League qualification.
The trend chart shows that Chelsea suffer from variable weekly gains – but they always gain – while Arsenal in the past two weeks have made a significant impact with a big increase in followers. The gap between the top six and the rest of the Premier League only ever widens.
The social media debate centres around whether clubs can significantly change their growth levels by their activity on Twitter and their content. Overall Twitter activity has been lower over the past week with fewer posts.
The trends chart for tweets shows variation over the weeks but the trends are still clear amongst the top six clubs by followers. Spurs and Man City show the highest twitter activity overall with Arsenal in third place. Chelsea show more dramatically differing highs and lows of activity.
Everton shot into top place in the weekly Tweets chart following a string of good results on the pitch. West Ham were second and Southampton third.
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