The traditional wisdom is that in rugby the backs are the glamour boys but the forwards are the ones that will be more solid when the chips are down.
Having offended half the rugby playing population with that initial thought we undertook a little experiment with Twitter to test the assumption.
The thing about stereotypes is that they are generally based on an element of truth.
Among the starting fifteen for the opening Guinness Series International against South Africa, the seven backs have a combined twitter following of 690,083, despite the fact that Jonathon Sexton’s account is largely dormant.
That compares to 528,584 across the pack, led on social media as on the pitch by Paul O’Connell and Jamie Heaslip.
If you are looking for engagement though you need to get with the men in the scrum. Jamie Heaslip’s 8,616 tweets is rising the fastest with 20 posts in the last seven days while Sean Cronin has been the second most active in the build up to the game. Between them the forwards have over 20% more posts than the backs.
From a commercial perspective there is surprisingly little engagement on brand promotion in recent days when attention is likely to be at a peak. That is something which individual sponsors like Toyota, Three and others might look to step up though care needs to be taken to maintain the personal tone on the account that, to be fair, Jamie Heaslip has down better than most.
Looking towards their opponents on Saturday the Springbok leaders include Bryan Habana whose 257,000 followers comes close to Ireland’s leader Tommy Bowe, and Victor Matfield in the forwards whose 158,000 is also behind the figures of Paul O’Connell and Heaslip.
Let’s hope that will be that case on the scoreboard just after 7pm on Saturday as well
Irish Rugby’s Twitter Profile |
||||
| Followers | Tweets last 7 days | Total Tweets | ||
| 15 | Rob Kearney | 206,000 | 3 | 4,554 |
| 14 | Tommy Bowe | 286,000 | 0 | 3,832 |
| 13 | Jared Payne | 8,562 | 0 | 1,555 |
| 12 | Robbie Henshaw | 6,824 | 1 | 1,150 |
| 11 | Simon Zebo | 100,000 | 1 | 1,683 |
| 10 | Jonathon Sexton | 3,459 | 0 | 12 |
| 9 | Conor Murray | 87,800 | 1 | 1,572 |
| 1 | Jack McGrath | 6,584 | 0 | 157 |
| 2 | Sean Cronin | 38,700 | 6 | 2,272 |
| 3 | Mike Ross | 31,300 | 4 | 843 |
| 4 | Devin Toner | 20,600 | 2 | 731 |
| 5 | Paul O’Connell | 198,000 | 1 | 204 |
| 6 | Peter O’Mahoney | 49,000 | 0 | 449 |
| 7 | Chris Henry | 20,400 | 0 | 2,045 |
| 8 | Jamie Heaslip | 164,000 | 20 | 8,616 |
Darragh Rea from Edelman, Rebecca Hocking from the GAA and a special guest speaker yet to be announced will be speaking in our ‘Get Social’ stream at Digital Sport 2014 in Dublin on November 27th. A limited number of tickets are still available. Today is the last day they can be bought at a reduced ‘getting closer’ rate. See details below.
