By Paul Nicholson
October 2 – Manchester United stormed past Chelsea this week to take second spot behind Arsenal in the table of overall Twitter followers. The Red Devils put on a massive 48,707 followers compared to the Gunners’ 26,259 and Chelsea’s meagre, in comparison, 17,769.
Man Utd’s gain was an increase of 9.57% on last week, as opposed to Chelsea’s decrease of 17.33% on the previous week. Arsenal were also down in growth by 3.97%.
At the other end of scale, Newcastle increased followers by 4,094 – a growth of 13.09% from the previous week and in line with what was an increase in home attendance last weekend when the club drew with Chelsea.
Clearly success stimulates followers while bad publicity and image damage will hit growth rates. Chelsea who were matching Arsenal’s growth rates can correlate the drop off to the timings of the increased unsavoury rantings of manager Jose Mourinho and criticism of star forward Diego Costa.
It is seems inevitable that Chelsea will turn their results round, but will they turn round their popularity levels and start matching the increases of their big club rivals again? And if not, at what point does this become a concern for the business decision makers?
Do more tweets correlate to more new followers? The answer is broadly yes, but there are anomalies. When it comes to tweets made, Arsenal topped the week’s table tweeting 412 times but their growth in followers was down 3.97%. Man Utd tweeted 327 times – up 8% from last week, but their growth in followers was up by 9.57%.
Chelsea tweeted 323 times – up 16% from last week – but growth in followers down 17.33 %. Newcastle tweeted 179 times with a growth of 6% whilst growth in followers rose by 13.09%
Clearly events on and off the pitch play a strong role and, whatever happens, Man Utd with their strong brand and quality of images and video clips, just seem to grow and grow whatever.
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