By Paul Nicholson
May 18 – Manchester United had a bumper week in terms of new Twitter followers in the Insideworldfootball Twitter ranking. Averaging gains of about 19,000 each week over their nearest rivals Chelsea and Arsenal, last week Man Utd added almost 50,000 new followers, double that of the London duo.
The table ranking clubs by new followers is static in the top 11 places, but there is considerable movement up and down at the bottom half of the table. Not surprisingly Burnley and QPR are anchored at the bottom, but above them Southampton, West Ham and Stoke City are all risers, while Leicester City, Hull and Sunderland all dropped places.
Source: All charts Sports Perspective
The correlation coefficient between New Followers and Total Followers is very high at 0.90777. Basically if you have a high number of total followers then it is extremely likely you will get a high number of new followers this week, reinforcing the differentials between the haves and the have less.
The table that is showing huge movement is the ranking of top tweets week-on-week. Man City stormed to the top of the tweets again whilst Man U sunk back down to the bottom again. Aston Villa in second and Burnley made an end of season strike for third place.
The correlation coefficient of r=0.3316 shows a fairly good indication that clubs that have most new tweets this week also rank fairly high overall in total number of tweets.
The scatter graph maps the correlation between the total number of followers and the total number of tweets and gives a correlation factor of r=0.2094.
This value of 0.2094 doesn’t give the strongest predictive value of a direct link between tweeting and the number of followers a club has, but it is there.
Noticeably the chart shows just how different Arsenal, Man Utd, Liverpool and Chelsea are from the rest, with Man Utd on its own in the top left as it holds the unique position of having many followers but lagging a long way behind in number of tweets.
In this respect the power of the Man Utd brand is overcoming allcomers and is out in a league of its own. Take them out the equation and the evidence suggests that efforts put into a tweeting strategy do result in brand-building and increased social media opportunity for clubs.
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