Manchester City and Twitter

Following on from previous posts looking at football and Twitter, this current post looks at some of the activity on Twitter from Manchester City. Man City are current Premier League holders and arguably the richest club in the world so to some extent getting an extra few retweets isn't the most important thing for the club.

That said, with Financial Fair Play being introduced (where clubs have to sort-of be self-sufficient, although as it involves UEFA who knows how it'll actually play out), the club needs to maximise its off-field revenues and Social Media will naturally be part of that.

Man City currently have almost 680k followers and have the fourth highest following in the League behind, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool (Manchester United are currently not on Twitter which is presumably a strategic decision but would likely gain several million followers within a matter of hours if they ever decide to join, such is their global reach).

I've mentioned in a previous blog about 'Sweating the Assets' as an organisation such as Man City will have huge amounts of interesting content but as people are wary about repeating a message for fear of annoying followers quite often the value isn't maximised.

Man City in part have taken this on-board with the example of promoting a video of one of their players John Guidetti who has just started playing again after injury:

Man City tweeting a link to the same article 3 times over the space of a few hours

As seen previously when looking at response to tweets from other accounts, response drops off dramatically within a matter of minutes so there's no reason to worry too much about over-promoting when mentioning the same thing 3 times over the space of 9 hours, there's a drop off in number of retweets but not the levels that you would see if you were repeat mailing the same people.  It also makes sense for an organisation that's looking to promote itself globally to take different time-zones into consideration.

The one thing I would suggest however is adding a dummy part to the URL so the shortlinks produced for each of the tweets are unique to give a true understanding of response per tweet.  There's more details on creating unique links in this blog.

Although the example above shows that they are considering multiple posts, generally speaking, items get posted only once, below are a couple of examples of recent tweets that have sufficient interest to be reposted but which were only posted once:

Recent Man City tweets showing the rapid decay in click-through, the Gallery tweet generating almost as much response in the first 7 minutes as the subsequent hour

Twitter is very much a 'blink and you'll miss it' medium and generally speaking most users won't have set up lists of key accounts such as the football team they support so there is real value in repetition along with considering peak usage times across the globe.

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