Gold medals, bid submissions, PRO12 finals, World Cup draws, historic Cricket Tests and junior tennis major hopes all form part of our look back on the social media metrics that matter from May 2017.
At a time when the rugby and soccer sporting seasons are drawing to a close, Ireland once again showed its appetite for supporting boys in green, no matter the occasion.
In a month when Munster lost in the final of the PRO12, Cricket Ireland took on England at Lords and the All-Ireland Championship kicked off, Tennis Ireland led the way this month for the highest engagement rate per post with their behind the scenes look at Simon Carr.
The son of Dublin GAA star, Tommy, Simon is playing at the French Open Junior Championship. The 40.2% Instagram engagement was huge for the Tennis Ireland, especially as the channel has just over 200 followers.
However they will have some way to go to match the reach, audience and engagement totals of Irish Rugby.
Their post on the 25th of May, reminding fans that there was a week to go to the submission date, may have had an engagement rate of 2.25% but due to their audience size that meant interactions with 13k people. The most of any post in May by a Sporting body.
The average engagement rate for Irish Sporting bodies across social was 2.05% on Instagram (excluding stories), 0.015% on Twitter and 0.14% on Facebook. Video was the most engaged post type at 0.21%, just ahead of photo, with music and events ahead of links and status updates.
Looking at audience growth, Gymnastics Ireland enjoyed the biggest surge with a 4.09% increase in followers across channels. Badminton Ireland grew 2.14% while of the big 4, Cricket Ireland and the GAA grew 1.12%, almost double that of Irish Rugby (0.65% growth)
While it may have the lowest engagement rate of all the channels, Twitter remains the most used channel in Irish Sport. Cricket Ireland produced the most content with 950 social posts, with almost 96% of this coming on twitter. 68% of the GAA’s 849 posts came on twitter while 72% of Go Racing’s 398 posts did.
Gymnastics Ireland were evenly spread across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram while Horse Sport Ireland and Badminton Ireland bucked the trend as they focused more on Facebook.
The decision to mix it up across channels worked for Gymnastics Ireland and Badminton Ireland as they featured highly in cross channel engagement rankings. Rowing Ireland and Swim Ireland also made the top 6.
Creating good content engages your audience, while retweets and shares spreads the message. Judging by their audience size and recent growth Irish Rugby is reaching a saturation point in Ireland, their growth of .65% was achieved in part from 11.8k shares and retweets. That tally was 10.3 times bigger than Gymnastics Ireland.
Mentions is one of our favourite metrics to follow. We love to see who is mentioning Irish Sport on twitter. This can help grow audience and spread the brand name. Cricket Ireland led the way in May with potential eyeballs of 33M, Star Sports India and Brad Hogg, Australian cricketer, was two of their main drivers. Their posts about Ireland’s quest to repeat their 2011 win over England and their test nation ambitions had 140 engagements from a total audience of 3.3M.
Eir Sport did their bit for the cause as they achieved 899 engagements from multiple mentions of Irish Sport while Tomas O’Se push for a venue change for the Carlow/Dublin clash had 534 interactions, the tally just ahead of Niall John O’Brien’s emotion filled post which achieved 509 interactions.
This report was compiled by Sport for Business member Sportego.
