For any professional sports club, having lots of fans is always a good thing, but having lots of fans who also engage with the club itself is even more valuable. And in today’s world, the best way to get involved with the club you love is most definitely via social media.
Sports fans are dedicated, vocal and emotional and most importantly tribal – they want to share. For sports teams and leagues looking to boost business, social media is a game-changer, delivering unprecedented, real-time engagement with this legion of fans eager for interaction.
Arsenal Football Club have proved remarkably successful in maintaining multiple touch-points with their domestic and international fan base and are working hard to ensure they adapt successfully to the emergence of new channels. Driving customer engagement is key to its success.
Getting to grips with consumers’ emotional connection to the brand is essential to being able to use technology to market a brand. Studies show that we make over 200 decisions each day about food alone and that most of these decisions are actually made unconsciously rather than rationally. This means there’s a clear need for brands to connect emotionally with consumers in order to play a part in their purchase decision making process.
The Club has dominated social media for some time, although in February Manchester United finally took the lead in a long fought battle for greatest number of Twitter followers (with only a few hundred between the leaders and over 500,000 differences before number three, Chelsea). With mobile rapidly becoming the device of choice, especially with the under 24s a strong presence on social media is vital to keep fan engagement high.
Arsenal FC @Arsenal is massive online, with over 7 million followers on Twitter (during a recent match their account was sending a Tweet a minute) and they have 5.6 million followers on Instagram. They regularly publish behind the scenes images, as well as match day snaps. And provide useful and interesting video content to their followers. They have a weekly podcast, the team and the individual players are online and on Facebook the Club has 35 million likes. That’s to say nothing of the legion of bloggers who interact with the Club, fans and each other.
And in football, it matters that you get it right. Arsene Wenger recently warned about the dangers of disgruntled fans saying, “”Before your opinion was a bit more isolated. Today straight away it becomes a stream of people who think the same way and they become a force. Maybe that’s the reason, I don’t know.”
But social media is about bringing fans closer to the club and what’s happening. While it’s also a driver for CRM to help funnel people onto its own platforms and essentially commercialise them for advertising, the goal is to keep the Club in its fans hearts.
And the growing interconnectedness of globalised communications means a huge new opportunity. Worldwide Arsenal boasts 124 officially recognised supporters’ clubs in more than 62 countries, with another 20 countries currently in the process of submitting applications, and catering to the global fanbase is another important part of Arsenal’s social strategy.
