By Tom Parsons
May 20 – Football clubs and media have increasingly turned to Twitter as their platform of choice for getting their audiences to vote for events and individuals as the end of term football awards season gets into full swing.
Clubs and media outlets alike realise the huge potential that Twitter has for fans to vote for these awards rather than getting them to phone in, text in or go to their website which are time consuming and can cost money.
BBC’s Match of the Day voted for their goal of the season on both Twitter and their website with Jack Wilshere’s brilliant team goal against Norwich the eventual winner with over 40% of the vote.
According to topsy.com there were over 20,000 uses of the hash tag #goal1 (Jack Wilshere’s voting hash tag) which has four times as many votes as second place Luis Suarez’s stunning strike, also against Norwich.
It’s also interesting to note that the BBC decided not to advertise the competition on their Facebook page suggesting that Twitter was a better forum to conduct this kind of vote. According to bitly.com, there were more votes conducted on Twitter than there were clicks to the BBC website to vote, again suggesting that this method of voting is becoming outdated as people choose to get involved via Twitter.
Tottenham Hotspur have done a similar vote for their goal of the season with fans able to vote on Twitter as well as their website. Their advertisements for the vote all included a picture of the goal and the hash tag needed to vote for the corresponding goal. Voting will go on until June 1 before a final decision is announced.
Aaron Ramsey was voted Arsenal’s man of the match in their FA Cup final win over Hull after fans on Twitter after Arsenal’s official Twitter account chose three players for the fans to vote for as their man of the match. Ramsey’s Tweet was retweeted by fans nearly 6,000 times holding off the challenge of Cazorla and Koscielny who managed 2,600 and 1,900 retweets respectively.
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