Social Media: Championship clubs

Last week, we looked at how the top 12 teams in the country use social media and what benefits it gives them.

Social media is certainly used across all levels of rugby and Talking Rugby Union wants to find out the difference between how the Premiership clubs use it to how the Championship clubs use social media.

Current Championship Table – Twitter Followers, Facebook Page Likes, Instagram Followers

Figures as of 26^th January 2015:

	Twitter	Facebook	Instagram
Bristol	21,400	8,551	1,600
Worcester	13,000	19,788	N/A
London Scottish	5,923	290*	494
Nottingham	8,970	3,551	310
Rotherham Titans	3,963	84**	N/A
Bedford	7,595	4,843	N/A
Cornish Pirates	6,105	10,436	N/A
Jersey	6,925	4,045	N/A
Yorkshire Carnegie	7,463	2,805	78
Moseley	2,669	1,651	15
Doncaster	4,637	264*	219
Plymouth Albion	4,923	2,977	229

*- Don’t have an official Facebook Page

**- Rotherham has a Facebook Page and a Facebook account which has just over 1,100 friends.

How the teams use Social Media

It is clear just from the table above that Premiership sides do have more followers and likes than Championship teams do. For example, in the Premiership, league leaders Northampton had 42,600 followers whereas Bristol who are top of the Championship have nearly half of that. However, in terms of Twitter, there is not much difference between how the Premiership sides use it to how the Championship sides use it.

The top two sides in the Championship are dominant in terms of how many followers they have on Twitter, but each club in the league uses it in the same way. Twitter is arguably the best form of social media for sports clubs as you can easily update information quickly which will immediately appear on the timelines of the people that follow the account. Also it is now one the quickest ways for fans to get the latest news about their clubs.

Each team publishes news articles on their website which they tweet throughout the week which include player interviews (whether that be written or video format), transfer news, ticket news as well as local community work the clubs are involved in. In addition to this they use twitter to publish images pre and post a match to allow the fans to get an inside scoop on what their team goes through on a match day.

Like the Premiership teams, the fans do play a part again on Twitter. The teams do interact with fans by retweeting them or marking their tweet as a favorite especially on a match day when Twitter is used a lot to create the match day experience for the fans not at the stadium as they tweet a link to the team news or tweet the team news and then update their Twitter feed throughout the game with the latest score updates and significant events which take place.

The big difference between the Premiership and Championship on social media is on Facebook and in particular Instagram.

Facebook is used by nearly all the Championship clubs in the same as Twitter is, but on a smaller scale. They will post the latest news articles, ticket news, team news and score lines from their matches including images and videos. The majority of the posts do contain links back to their club website, but fans once again can interact on Facebook by ‘Liking’ posts and posting their comments on various posts on the page.

The difference between the two tiers of rugby is again about how many people who have ‘liked’ the page. 146,086 people liked the Leicester Tigers Facebook page with the highest being just over 19,000 for the Championship. This was to be expected though due to the size of the clubs.

As for Instagram, it certainly is used much less in the Championship. Every single team in the Premiership was on Instagram showing that the larger fan base they have, the more benefits they will get from promoting themselves on another form of social media.  For now, the Championship’s sides are regularly using Twitter to promote themselves further and with more success, they social media profile will only increase.

So that’s how the Championship compares to the Premiership in terms of social media. can also follow and like Talking Rugby Union on Twitter: @TalkRugbyUnion, Facebook: Talking Rugby Union and on Instagram: @talkingrugbyunion.