November was another big month for Irish Sport, with the FAI’s World Cup playoff fixtures and Irish Rugby’s November Guinness series grabbing hold of the focus of the Irish sports fan.
However, other sporting organisations certainly merited attention, including the GAA as they took the fight down under in the International Rules games against Australia.
The total social following of the top 22 Irish Sporting bodies across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter is now 4.23M, up from 4.18M in October, a 1.12% increase.
The FAI built on their October success, as they grew their following by 17,646 (2.89%) in the past month due to the content they provided around their ultimately unsuccessful World Cup playoff games against Denmark.
Once again we find that the organisation which is most active on social is Basketball Ireland who produced 601 posts, with 73% of their content appearing on Twitter. In addition, Irish Rugby, Cycling Ireland and Paralympics Ireland stepped up their game in the past month, with big increases in output.
In November, our group of top Irish sporting bodies created an average of 4.26 posts on Twitter, which again massively outstrips Facebook and Instagram.
That is an occurance we see every month despite the far lower engagement rates on that platform. Instagram is up this month, from 0.35 to 0.49 posts per day, with Gymnastics Ireland standing out for balanced use of the platform in their social strategy.
29% of their 106 total posts were on Instagram, achieving 5.9k engagement at a rate of 4.36%.
Of the bigger names, Irish Rugby concentrate the most attention on Instagram. With 17% of their posts going up on the network, the organisation gains engagement numbers of 369k.
The FAI had a potential reach of 123M in November, dwarfing the 51.9M achieved by the IRFU. Cricket Ireland, the GAA and GoRacing also broke the million eyeball mark.
Basketball Ireland get a special mention as they achieved 596k reach with only 8.8k social followers, due largely to their large output of content.
The two biggest influencers in Irish sport during November were two player accounts. France-bound Munster winger Simon Zebo was the topic of much discussion due to his omission from the squad due to contract issues with the IRFU. His one best wishes tweet to the official IRFU account which contained the term “C’est le vie”, earned over 5k impressions.
Shane Duffy was one of the stars of the FAI’s World Cup qualifying campaign and his rallying cry following the first leg of the playoff games with Denmark was well received by the Irish fans.
This report and insight was produced exclusively for Sport for Business by Sportego. They work with sporting organisations to gain insights into their social media presence and their data, get in touch.
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