By Paul Nicholson
June 20 – Will the Premier League new boys have their work cut out in the Twitter rankings in the same way that they will have to battle for points for Premiership position, and most likely survival?
Insideworldfootball’s twitter stats show that Watford and Bournemouth enter the total Twitter followers table in the bottom two positions with 68,000 and 61,000 followers with a lot of catch-up to do. There is a significant gap to Leicester City who are in 18th position with 174,000 followers.
The gap to the top three of Arsenal, Chelsea and Man Utd who have 5.9 million, 5.7 million and 5.3 million respectively is enormous.
They look better positioned than Watford and Bournemouth to benefit from the social media challenge and opportunity that the Premier League provides, and they have of course had prior experience of the big league.
Source: All tables and charts, Sports Perspective
Looking at the basics needed to mount that challenge, Norwich and Bournemouth both look to be prepared for the battle and are already working hard. In the ranking of tweets made, Norwich are 10th and Bournemouth 13th.
Watford are significantly lower at 18th – just one place ahead of Manchester United. However, Man Utd also spend time tweeting across their international language accounts as well as their main English account.
Demonstrating large and active social media bases is increasingly important for clubs to attract the bigger sponsorship budgets. For Bournemouth in particular this is important as their ground capacity is just 11,700, hence the need to show they engage with large numbers of via social media. The speed of growth of their Twitter following in Premier League will be crucial.
The challenge for Bournemouth and Watford and their 60,000+ Twitter bases is put into stark context when looking at the growth for the top three clubs of Man Utd, Arsenal and Chelsea in the four weeks since the end of the season.
Their rate of growth of Twitter followers has barely slowed with Man Utd putting on a staggering 219,000 followers and closing the gap on Arsenal and Chelsea who top the overall Twitter followers chart by over 90,000.
Arsenal have put on 130,000 followers since the end of the season and Chelsea have added 110,000.
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