A Munster man captained the Lions, Cricket Ireland became a full test nation, the IABA entered murky waters and the McGregor/Mayweather fight was announced. Together they ensured that June was another action filled month for Irish sport on social media.
This month’s report celebrates 2 years since we began. Then we tracked the big 4, Cricket Ireland, GAA, Irish Rugby and the FAI. Now on our 24th report, we are monitoring the engagement, interaction and growth for 24 Irish Sporting NGB’s with the Olympic Council of Ireland and the Irish MMA body both added this month by request.
We begin our review by looking at growth. The total audience of Irish sporting bodies now stands at over 4 Million, 1.4M of which belongs to Irish Rugby. They grew 0.91% in June, 3 times less than the growth overseen by the FAI at 2.8%. Cycling Ireland saw growth of 2.75% while Cricket Ireland saw growth of 2.38% on their social channels, fuelled by their exciting rise to a test nation.
Instagram stories and Snapchat cannot yet be fully tracked due to public API availability. We realise that they have both become important channels for Irish Sporting bodies and hope to have a better way to track them in time.
However of the public information available we have determined that the FAI had the most engagements on social in June with 18.2k of their Facebook audience interacting with their post looking for for flag bearers for the Austria World Cup Qualifier at the Aviva Stadium.
The tally was 3k more than their trip down memory lane as they recalled Robbie Brady’s goal at Euro 2016.
Irish Rugby reached 13k of their Instagram audience as they wished Peter O’Mahony good wishes ahead of his first test captaincy.
Switching the view to engagement rate as opposed to the actual number Tennis Ireland and Basketball Ireland top the charts.
Tennis Ireland reached 21.6% of their audience on Instagram while Justin Bieber helped Basketball Ireland to 697 engagement as he shot some hoops in Bushy Park.
Hashtag wise, #Ireland and #teamireland were the two most popular used across all channels. Outsided of these two popular tags, #COYBIG was the next most popular for engagement on Facebook with #SportIreland the most engaged on Instagram and #OlympicDay and #COYGIG featuring highly on Twitter.
Finally, amplification and mentions are two areas we love to focus on.
Amplification, focusing on reposts, shares and retweets is the best way to reach new audience in an organic sense and means you are either celebrating success others want to share or creating damn good content.
In June, the FAI, the GAA and Irish Rugby had reposts, shares and retweets over 10k with Cricket Ireland and Horse Sport Ireland completing the top 5. While mentions is people tagging you on twitter and giving eyeballs to your brand.
Cricket Ireland must take a bow as they had 69.9M eyeballs in June with the ICC, Lalit Kumar Modi and Irfan Pathan delivering 19.3k total engagements. eir Sport also deserve credit for their role in Irish sport and highlighting it, they mentioned sporting bodies 95 times in June.
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If you are a member of Sport for Business and would like to see your numbers included in this monthly review, drop us a line and we will see what we can do for you. Next month we look forward to welcoming MotorSport Ireland to the fold.
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The Irish Sport Social Media report is produced exclusively for Sport for Business by our members at Sportego.
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Find out more about our next major event looking at the impact of Sport for Social Good in September 2017.
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